I think most of us have had this conversation. Two kids keep trying to one-up each other with bigger and bigger numbers, until one inevitably pulls out the trump number, infinity.

The problem is, Superman here is wrong.

Infinity plus one is totally a thing.

To really understand infinity, we need to think about about it in two different ways. The first is to ask, “What is the number infinity?” The second is to ask, “What does it mean to have infinitely many?” The first we’ll answer in this post, the second we’ll answer next week.

So, what is infinity?

All of this depends on what precise definitions you choose to use, but the school child’s idea is still about right. What number occurs after all the other numbers? Well, infinity, of course.

Think about it this way: two is the number after one. Three is the number after two, and so on. Each counting number (also called natural number) is followed by another. Then, we define a number , the Greek letter omega, to be the number just after all of the counting numbers. This clearly has to be infinity!

But what’s the number after ? Well, of course. Then . And, after all of those, . It goes on. You can go on for as many layers as you wish.

Numbers like 1, 2 or are called ordinals since they define the order of things. You have the first thing, the second thing and the -th thing.

While isn’t useful in a lot of places in math, it does provide one resolution of the famous Zeno’s paradox. (Actually, Zeno has six surviving paradoxes, but let’s talk about the most famous one.) Achillles, the fastest of the Greek warriors, is chasing a tortoise. However, he can’t ever catch the tortoise. Why not?

In order to catch the tortoise, Achilles must first reach the place where the tortoise began. But by the time he arrives, the tortoise has moved farther away. Thus, Achilles has to run to that spot, but, again, the tortoise has moved on. Since Achilles must repeatedly reach the spot where the tortoise was, he can never catch the tortoise.

Now, of course this sounds silly. Many of these philosophical paradoxes do. Zeno tried to use this to show that all movement is an illusion, despite our experience to the contrary.

But let’s talk about this using our new idea.

Let’s say Achilles runs 10 times faster than the tortoise, but starts 100 meters behind him. After Achilles has gone 100 meters, the tortoise is still 10 meters ahead. After Achilles has gone that next 10 meters (110 meters) total), the tortoise is yet another meter ahead. And after Achilles has gone that additional meter (111 meters total), the dang tortoise is already ahead by another tenth of a meter. And so on and so forth, ad nauseum.

After 20 cycles of this, Achilles has still not caught up, though he is closer than the diameter of an electron.

Achilles is still behind the tortoise, though.

But the -th cycle is, by definition, the cycle after all of those cycles. And since he’s getting infinitely close during the first finitely many cycles, at the -th cycle, Achilles has exactly caught up to the tortoise.

How long does it take for Achilles to catch the tortoise?

If he is traveling at 10 m/s (Olympic sprinter pace), the first cycle―100 meters―takes ten seconds, the first two cycles―110 meters total―takes 11 seconds, while the first cycles takes 11.1111… seconds (or 100/9, to be exact).

And so, Achilles can quickly catch the tortoise.

Using this idea, we’ve come up with a number representing infinity. We also have numbers that are after infinity. But while is after , is it bigger than ? How about or ?

Before you decide, listen to this story.

The Hitchhiker’s Hotel is the largest hotel in the galaxy. In fact, it has infinitely many rooms. One night, every room was filled, when an unfortunate traveler came in begging for a room for the night. Fortunately for her, the hotel has a policy for such circumstances. They called each room and told them to pack up and move to the room with the next higher number on it. Each guest did so and the hotel worker put the new guest up in room number one.

When we started, we had infinitely many guests in infinitely many rooms. After our lucky guest came, we had one more guest and the same number of rooms, but each guest still had their own room. So they must be the same size, right?

In the next post, I’ll talk about how to carefully tell which set of things is bigger, and then show that some surprisingly different things are the same size.

–> Next Post: The size of infinity