Working with the set of real numbers (was: Finding size of Variable)

[Chris Kaynor]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 9:43 AM, Steven D'Aprano <
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:

> At one time, Euler summed an infinite series and got -1, from which he
> concluded that -1 was (in some sense) larger than infinity. I don't know
> what justification he gave, but the way I think of it is to take the
> number line from -∞ to +∞ and then bend it back upon itself so that there
> is a single infinity, rather like the projective plane only in a single
> dimension. If you start at zero and move towards increasingly large
> numbers, then like Buzz Lightyear you can go to infinity and beyond:
>
> 0 -> 1 -> 10 -> 10000 -> ... ∞ -> ... -10000 -> -10 -> -1 -> 0
>

This makes me think that maybe the universe is using ones or two complement
math (is there a negative zero?)...

Chris
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