CHAPTER ONE

INFINITY

A SHORT HISTORY OF INFINITY

The symbol for infinity that one sees most often is the lazy eight
curve, technically called the lemniscate. This symbol was first used in a
seventeenth century treatise on conic sections. l It caught on quickly
and was soon used to symbolize infinity or eternity in a variety of con-
texts. For instance, in the 1700s the infinity symbol began appearing on
the Tarot card known as the Juggler or the Magus. It is an interesting

Tarot card is the Hebrew letter X, (pronounced ale£), for Georg Cantor,
coincidence that the Qabbalistic symbol associated with this particular

the founder of the modern mathematical theory of the infinite, used the
symbol Xo, (pronounced alef-null), to stand for the first infinite number.
The appropriateness of the symbol 00 for infinity lies in the fact that
one can travel endlessly around such a curve . . . demolition derby
style, if you will. Endlessness is, after all, a principal component of one's
concept of infinity. Other notions associated with infinity are indefinite-
ness and inconceivability.

Figure 1.
2 INFINITY AND THE MIND

Figure 2.

Infinity commonly inspires feelings of awe, futility, and fear. Who as

a child did not lie in bed filled with a slowly mounting terror while sink-
ing into the idea of a universe that goes on and on, for ever and ever?
Blaise Pascal puts this feeling very well: "When I consider the small
span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of
space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of
spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and as-
tonished to see myself here instead of there . . . now instead of
then."2
It is possible to regard the history of the foundations of mathematics

and more infinities. The Greek word for infinity was apeiron, which lit-
as a progressive enlarging of the mathematical universe to include more

fined. Apeiron was a negative, even pejorative, word. The original chaos
erally means unbounded, but can also mean infinite, indefinite, or unde-
 INFINITY 3

out of which the world was formed was apeiron. An arbitrary crooked
line was apeiron. A dirty crumpled handkerchief was apeiron. Thus,
apeiron need not only mean infinitely large, but can also mean totally
disordered, infinitely complex, subject to no finite determination. In
Aristotle's words, co • • • being infinite is a privation, not a perfection

There was no place for the apeiron in the universe of Pythagoras and
but the absence of a limit. . . . "3

Plato. Pythagoras believed that any given aspect of the world could be
represented by a finite arrangement of natural numbers, (where "natural
number" means "whole number.") Plato believed that even his ultimate
form, the. Good, must be finite and definite. This was in contradistinc-
tion to almost all later metaphysicians, who assumed that the Absolute

Greek mathematics was limited by this refusal to accept the apeiron,

is necessarily infinite. In the next chapter I will discuss the way in which

even in the relatively harmless guise of a real number with an infinite

decimal expansion.

seem to point to the actuality of the apeiron. For instance, it seems pos-
Aristotle recognized that there are many aspects of the world that

sible that time will go on forever; and it would seem that space is infi-
nitely divisible, so that any line segment contains an infinity of points.

derliness of his a priori finite world, Aristotle invented the notion of the
In order to avoid these actual infinites that seemed to threaten the or-

potentially infinite as opposed to the actually infinite. I will describe this

distinction in more detail in the next section, but for now let me charac-
terize it as follows. Aristotle would say that the set of natural numbers is
potentially infinite, since there is no largest natural number, b\lt he
would deny that the set is actually infinite, since it does not exist as one
finished thing. This is a doubtful distinction, and I am inclined to agree
with Cantor's opinion that co • • • in truth the potentially infinite has
only a borrowed reality, insofar as a potentially infinite concept always
points towards a logically prior actually infinite concept whose existence
it depends on."4
Plotinus was the first thinker after Plato to adopt the belief that at
least God, or the One, is infinite, stating of the One that, "Absolutely
One, it has never known measure and stands outside of number, and so
is under no limit either in regard to anything external or internal; for
any such determination would bring something of the dual into it."5
St. Augustine, who adapted the Platonic philosophy to the Christian
religion, believed not only that God was infinite, but also that God
could think infinite thoughts. St. Augustine argued that, "Such as say
that things infinite are past God's knowled8e may just as well leap head-
4 INFINITY AND THE MIND

long into this pit of impiety, and say that God knows not all numbers.
. . . What madman would say so? . . . What are we mean wretches
that dare presume to limit His knowledge ?"6
This extremely modern position will be returned to in the last section
of this chapter. Later medieval thinkers did not go as far as Augustine

grant that any of God's creatures could be infinite. In his Summa Theolo-
and, although granting the unlimitedness of God, were unwilling to

giae St. Thomas Aquinas gives a sort of Aristotelian proof that "al-
though God's power is unlimited, he still cannot make an absolutely un-
limited thing, no more than he can make an unmade thing (for this
involves contradictories being true together)."7 The arguments are ele-
gant, but suffer from the flaw of being circular: it is proved that the no-
tion of an unlimited thing is contradictory by slipping in the premise
that a "thing" is by its very nature limited.
Thus, with the exception of Augustine and a few others, the medieval
thinkers were not prepared to deal with the infinitude of any entities
other than God, be they physical, psychological, or purely abstract. The
famous puzzle of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin can
be viewed as a question about the relationship between the infinite
Creator and the finite world. The crux of this problem is that, on the
one hand, it would seem that since God is infinitely powerful, he should
be able to bid an infinite number of angels to dance on the head of a pin;
on the other hand, it was believed by the medieval thinkers that no ac-
tually infinite collection could ever arise in the created world.

---+---fP'

Figure 3.
 INFINITY 5

Their proofs that infinity is somehow a self-contradictory notion were

all flawed, but there was at least one interesting paradox involving infin-
ity that the medieval thinkers were aware of. It would seem that any line
includes infinitely many points. Since the circumference of a circle with

dius one, then the former should include a larger infinity of points than
radius two is two times as long as the circumference of a circle with ra-

the latter. But by drawing radii we can see that each point P on the small
circle corresponds to exactly one point P' on the large circle, and each
point Q' on the large circle corresponds to exactly one point Q on the
small circle. Thus we seem to have two infinities that are simultaneously
different and equal.
In the early 1600s Galileo Galilei offered a curious solution to this
problem. Galileo proposed that the smaller length could be turned into
the longer length by adding an infinite number of infinitely small gaps.
He was well aware that such a procedure leads to various difficulties:
"These difficulties are real; and they are not the only ones. But let us
remember that we are dealing with infinites and indivisibles, both of
which transcend our finite understanding, the former on account of
their magnitude, the latter because of their smallness. In spite of this,
men cannot refrain from discussing them, even though it must be done
in a roundabout way. "8
He resolved some of his difficulties by asserting that problems arise
only, "when we attempt, with our finite minds, to discuss the infinite,
assigning to it those properties which we give to the finite and limited;
but this I think is wrong, for we cannot speak of infinite quantities as
being the one greater or less than or equal to another."9 This last asser-
tion is supported by an example that is sometimes called Galileo's para-
dox.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
t t t t t t t
1 4 9 16 25 36 49
The paradoxical situation arises because, on the one hand, it seems
evident that most natural numbers are not perfect squares, so that the
set of perfect squares is smaller than the set of all natural numbers; but,
on the other hand, since every natural number is the square root of ex-
actly one perfect square, it would seem that there are just as many per-
fect squares as natural numbers. For Galileo the upshot of this paradox
was that, "we can only infer that the totality of all numbers is infinite,
and that the number of squares is infinite . . . ; neither is the number
of squares less than the totality of all numbers, nor the latter greater
6 INFINITY AND THE MIND

than the former; and finally, the attributes 'equal,' 'greater,' and 'less,'
are not applicable to infinite, but only to finite quantities."lo
I have quoted Galileo at some length, because it is with him that we
have the first signs of the modern attitude toward the actual infinite in
mathematics. If infinite sets do not behave like finite sets, this does not
mean that infinity is an inconsistent notion. It means, rather, that infi-
nite numbers obey a different "arithmetic" from finite numbers. If using
the ordinary notions of "equal" and "less than" on infinite sets leads to
contradictions, this is not a sign that infinite sets cannot exist, but,
rather, that these notions do not apply without modification to infinite

these notions; this was to be the task of Georg Cantor, some 250 years
sets. Galileo himself did not see how to carry out such a modification of

later.
One of the reasons that Galileo felt it necessary to come to some sort
of terms with the actual infinite was his desire to treat space and time as

motion can be stated in the form that x = !(t), that space position is a
continuously varying quantities. Thus, the results of an experiment on

grows continuously from, say, zero to ten is apeiron, both in the sense
certain function of continuously changing time. But this variable t that

that it takes on arbitrary values, and in the sense that it takes on infi-
nitely many values.
This view of position as a function of time introduced a problem that
helped lead to the founding of the Calculus in the late 1600s. The prob-

whose distance x from its starting point is given as a function !(t) of

lem was that of finding the instantaneous velocity of a moving body,

It turns out that to calculate the velocity at some instant to, one has to
time.

imagine measuring the speed over an infinitely small time interval dt.
The speed!,(to ) at to is given by the formula <f(to + dt) - !(to»/dt, as

The quantity dt is called an infinitesimal, and obeys many strange

everyone who has ever survived a first-year calculus course knows.

rules. If dt is added to a regular number, then it can be ignored, treated

like zero. But, on the other hand, dt is regarded as being different
enough from zero to be usable as the denominator of a fraction. So is dt
zero or not? Adding finitely many infinitesimals together just gives an-
other infinitesimal. But adding infinitely many of them together can
give either an ordinary number, or an infinitely large quantity.
Bishop Berkeley found it curious that mathematicians could swallow
the Newton-Leibniz theory of infinitesimals, yet balk at the peculiari-
ties of orthodox Christian doctrine. He wrote about this in a 1734
 INFINITY 7

work, the full title of which was, The Analyst, Or A Discourse Addressed to
an Infidel Mathematician. Wherein It is examined whether the Object, Prin-
ciples, and Inferences of the modern Analysis are more distinctly conceived, or
more evidently deduced, than Religious Mysteries and Points of Faith. "First
cast out the beam out of thine own Eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast
out the mote out of thy brother's Eye."ll
The use of infinitely small and infinitely large numbers in calculus was
soon replaced by the limit process. But it is unlikely that the Calculus
could ever have developed so rapidly if mathematicians had not been
willing to think in terms of actual infinities. In the past fifteen years,
Abraham Robinson's non-standard analysis has produced a technique

inson's technique involves enlarging the real numbers to the set of hy-
by which infinitesimals can be used without fear of contradiction. Rob-

perreal numbers, which will be discussed in Chapter 2.

After the introduction of the limit process, calculus was able to ad-

But as mathematicians tried to get a precise description of the continuum

vance for a long time without the use of any actually infinite quantities.

or real line, it became evident that infinities in the foundations of math-

ematics could only be avoided at the cost of great artificiality. Mathema-
ticians, however, still hesitated to plunge into the world of the actually
infinite, where a set could be the same size as a subset, a line could have
as many points as a line half as long, and endless processes were treated
as finished t~ings.
In was Georg Cantor who, in the late 1800s, finally created a theory
of the actual infinite which by its apparent consistency, demolished the
Aristotelian and scholastic "proofs" that no such theory could be found.
Although Cantor was a thoroughgoing scholar who later wrote some
very interesting philosophical defenses of the actual infinite, his point of
entry was a mathematical problem having to do with the uniqueness of
the representation of a function as a trigonometric series.
To give the flavor of the type of construction Cantor was working
with, let us consider the construction of the Koch curve shown in Fig-
ure 4. The Koch curve is found as the limit of an infinite sequence of
approximations. The first approximation is a straight line segment (stage
0). The middle third of this segment is then replaced by two pieces,
each as long as the middle third, which are joined like two sides of an
equilateral triangle (stage 1). At each succeeding stage, each line seg-
ment has its middle third replaced by a spike resembling an equilateral
triangle.
Now, if we take infinity as something that can, in some sense, be at-
8 INFINITY AND THE MIND

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

Figure 4. Adapted from Benoit Mandelbrot, Fractals.