Re: Infinities

Anton Sherwood (dasher@netcom.com)
Mon, 17 Nov 1997 18:42:00 -0800 (PST)

Damien Broderick writes
: There's a century of mathematics dealing with this topic [orders of
: infinity]. I'm entranced to find people starting again from scratch.
: Next we could have a heated debate about whether parallel lines meet. :)

Sure, why not. I hear that Marilyn Vos Savant says the recent proof
of Fermat's Last Theorem is unsound because it relies on nonEuclidean
geometry.

Now, which had less of an excuse to distrust hyperbolic geometry:
Ms Vos Savant, or C.L.Dodgson?

(Dodgson rejected it because of ideal triangles - figures with infinite
perimeter, zero angles, and finite area - which he called absurd.)

Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com