Notes On Infinity

Joe Dillstrom

Introduction
The concept of infinity is, of course, an unwieldy one. It is, however, instructive to trace
both the history of this concept and the way that it intersects the disciplines of philosophy
and mathematics. This document is intended as a short introduction toward that end.

Zenos Paradox
Around 300 BCE, the Presocratic philosopher Zeno of Elea proposed a set of immensely subtle paradoxes that were intended to support the arguments of another Eleatic philosopher,
Parmenides. Parmenides argued that our world of constant change is best understood as
a set of shifting appearances, and that underneath our phenomenal world lie some real,
static, unchanging reality. In short, Parmenides philosophy was a radical denial of plurality.
(As a sidenote, the influence of Parmenides thought on Plato is pretty clear). Zeno was a
proponent of Parmenides conclusions and sought to demonstrate their validity by proving
that motion is impossible. With this intention he devised his paradoxes. Eight or nine of
Zenos paradoxes are extant, and they are all essentially the same. The most famous of these
is the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, but for a clearer motivation we will rehearse the
Dichotomy Paradox.
The Dichotomy Paradox. Suppose that you wish to walk two feet. In order to walk two
feet, you must first walk one foot. In order to walk one foot, you must first walk a half of a
foot, and then a quarter of a foot, and then an eighth of a foot, and then a sixteenth, and
so on ad infinitum. It follows that motion is impossible.
The paradox is this: In order to walk two feet, you are faced with having to add up an
infinite sum of (decreasing) distances in order to do so. But certainly you can walk two feet!
An act as simple as walking two feet gives rise to an infinite sum. From an ancient Greek
point of view, which lacked a formal concept of infinity, such a problem was intractable. It
appears that motion, in a purely ontological sense, really is something of an illusion.
As you might imagine, many of the best philosophers of their time had something to say
about this problem (as a sidenote, Jorge Luis Borges essay Avatars of the Tortoise draws
a connection between Zenos Paradoxes and infinite regression arguments through the
development of philosophy). Many claimed to have solved or refuted it through this or that
argument. Zenos paradoxes withstood nearly 2000 years of attacks until the matter was
settled by the development of calculus. In short, infinite series, that is, infinite sums, can
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be computed provided that the ratio of successive terms is shrinking quickly enough. We
could write down the Dichotomy Paradox arithmetically as

2k = 1 +

k=1

1
1 1 1
+ + +
+
2 4 8 16

This is an example of a class of infinite sums (or series) called a Geometric Series, in which
1
successive terms have a common ratio r, in this case, r = . In (usually) a second calculus
2
course you prove that a geometric series, say Sn , has a finite value provided that r is between
1 and 1, or |r| < 1. In this case the sum of the series is equal to the first term (s) divided
by 1 minus the common ratio (r), or, as n goes to infinity (i.e., you add up more and more
terms),
Sn =

s
1r

.
Now applying this idea to the Dichotomy Paradox, the first term in the sum is the first
distance you need to traverse, so s = 1. In the paradox each successive interval that you
1
walk is halved, so the common ratio is r = . Since |r| < 1, this is an example of a Geometric
2
Series that does add up (or converges) to a finite number, and this number is given by
1+

1 1 1
1
1
1
+ + +
+ =
=
=2
2 4 8 16
1 1/2
1/2

So you can walk two feet after all!

The essence of Zenos paradox is that there is an apparent disconnect between our physical
experience of the world and our mental ability to infinitely subdivide a given finite length.
The calculus of series, which is a particular application of limits of sequences, bridges the
gap between these two facets of our experience of the world.

Georg Cantors Theories of Infinity

Now, even among Newton and Leibniz, who discovered calculus independently of each other,
and also among the several waves of prominent mathematicians who pushed calculus towards
what we know it as today, there was a tendency to run roughshod over the idea of infinity.
For example, in a rough sense, calculus gives you the vocabulary to describe the process of
unbounded change. The very idea of a limit, which is a way of talking about the extremes
of the behavior of certain mathematical objects, implicitly relies on the idea of infinity, and
this becomes even more apparent when you use limits to define the main calculus operations
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of derivatives and integrals. To put it simply, infinity is built right into the main ideas of
calculus. Among the minds mentioned earlier, there was no formal sense of what infinity
actually meant, or how much of a handle we could get on it, beyond it being roughly thought
of as meaning increasing without bound and left alone. (I am, of course, oversimplifying
considerably here, but this is the essence of it).
This all changed toward the end of the nineteenth century with Georg Cantor (1845-1918).
Cantor was a Prussian mathematician who made contributions to a variety of branches of
mathematics. His legacy rests upon being the founder of set theory, which is the foundation
of all abstract mathematics. Now, Cantors original formulation has some logical issues (see
Russells Paradox), but the essence of his set theory is arguably one of the greatest creations
in the history of human thought.

Lets Talk About Sets, Baby

A set S is a collection of objects. The nature of the objects is not relevant. Members of
the set S are called elements of the set, and to indicate that an element s belongs to a set
we write s S. To indicate that an element is not in our set, we write s
/ S. The set
consisting of zero elements is called the empty set and we denote this set by = {}. Sometimes we can explicitly write down what a set is, like A = {1, 2, 3}, where the convention
is to denote a set by a capital letter, and to list the elements of a set within curly brackets. Sometimes we can write down the members of a set implicitly in terms of a rule. For
example, the integers, the positive and negative whole numbers, could be written down as
Z = {. . . , 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . } (here, Z is the traditional symbol for the integers; the doublespine Z is chosen after the German word for number, Zahlen). We usually just write down
Z. Suppose we wanted to write down the set of even integers, though. Since every even integer is a multiple of two, we might call this set 2Z, and write 2Z = {. . . , 4, 2, 0, 2, 4, . . . }.
This is still clumsy, though: we have to use ellipses to indicate that the even integers extend
infinitely in both directions. Instead we could write 2Z = {2k | k Z}. This captures what
we care about with the even integersnamely, that they are the multiples of 2.
We are frequently interested in sets that are contained in other sets. Given a set A, a subset
of A is a set B such that every element of B is an element of A. We write B A. The lower
bar in the symbol means that B could potentially be A (note from the definition that every
set is a subset of itself). A proper subset of A is a subset of A that is not A itself, and we
write B A.
The size of a set A is called its cardinality and we denote this by |A|. The cardinality of
a set can be finite or infinite. For A = {1, 2, 3}, we have |A| = 3. The integers are infinite,
however, so we might write |Z| = . For the empty set, || = 0, and it is clear that this is
the smallest cardinality of any set.
The importance of the above is twofold:

 Proving results about sets, independent of what the sets contain, will hold true for any
collection of objects whatsoever, and
as a result, grounding mathematics in the language and theory of sets is a natural way
to develop the subject.

Back To Cantor
Cantors genius towards the theory of infinity was to draw a connection between our intuitive
sense of what infinity is with the sizes of collections of objects. For motivation, consider the
following:
Lets say that you are looking at a collection of rocks and a collection of shells. How would
you be able to compare the sizes of these sets without being able to count either of them?
Well, for every rock you might place a shell next to it. If you end up having any shells
leftover, then you know that the collection of rocks is smaller in size than the collection
of shells. Vice versa if you run out of shells. If, for every rock, you can uniquely pair it with
a seashell, that is, if there are no leftovers, then you know that the sizes of both sets are equal.
This is effectively a generalization of counting. Formally, what we did above was to define
a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets. This told us that their cardinalities
are equal.
Now, theres no need to do this for finite sets, of course (just count the damn things!) but
Cantor applied this idea to infinite sets and discovered some surprising things. Well need
some definitions.
The set of nonnegative whole numbers, {0,1,2,3,4,. . . }, is called the natural numbers,
which we denote by N. We also call these the counting numbers. Clearly, the size of the
natural numbers is infinite.
Definition. A set S is said to be countable if either S is finite or if S can be put into a
one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. (In the latter case we also say that S
is countably infinite).
Remark. Note that if a set S is countably infinite, then we can write down its elements
one by one as a list, so we often say that a countably infinite set S is listable, and we make
frequent use of this idea in showing that a set is countable.
Definition. A set S is said to be uncountable if S is not countable.
From the above, a set S is countable if it is finite or if we can pair up every member of S
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with a natural number. In this sense our intuitive notion of counting is extended to infinite
sets; the counting will never stop, but at least we could theoretically assign each member of
S to a natural number.
Now, in our everyday sense of the term, if we take two collections of objects whose sizes
are infinite, they are effectively the same size. We might say that both are countable. Our
reasoning might go something like: Well, the natural numbers are infinite, and so are these
two sets, so there has to be a way to pair up these sets with the natural numbers, even if
we dont know exactly what that way is.
Put another way, its a natural question to ask whether uncountable sets even exist at all!
Were almost there, but lets first get some results about countable sets and see some arguments that show how certain expected sets are countable. In the following, by countable, we
mean countably infinite (the finite case is trivial).

Results Concerning Countable Sets

Proposition 1. If a set A is countable, then any subset B of A is countable.
Proof. (Informal, by contradiction) Suppose that A is countable and let B be a subset of
A, where B is uncountable. Then by definition B cannot be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers. But since A is countable and every element of B is
an element of A, B can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers.
This is a contradiction.
Proposition 2. The integers Z are countable.
Proof. (Informal) We have to find a way to list all of the integers. This is easy, but we need
to start counting at zero. So lets start counting the integer zero with the natural number
zero. Then, if z is a positive integer, we will count it as an even natural number, so the
second number in our list is 1. If z is a negative integer, we will count it as an odd natural
number, so the third number in our list will be 1. The resulting list of the integers is then
0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, . . .
In this sense we have provided a scheme to count the integers. This completes the proof.

Notice that by Proposition 1, the even integers, 2Z, as a subset of the integers, are also
countable. So infinite sets can have proper subsets of the same size, that is |Z| = |N| = |2Z|.
Compare this to finite sets; no set of six elements has a proper subset containing six elements.
This is a small way in which the nature of infinite sets is different from that of finite sets.

The set of all fractions a/b, where a and b are integers, is called the rational numbers and
is denoted by Q.
Now, consider all of the numbers between 0 and 1. Theres a whole lotta fractions in there.
For example, all of the distances that show up in the Dichotomy Paradox are between 0
1
1 1 1
and 1: 1, , , , . . . . Moreover, any number of the form , where n is a natural number,
2 4 8
n
1 1 1
is between 0 and 1: 1, , , , . . . . So it appears that there are infinitely many fractions
2 3 4
between the first two natural numbers 0 and 1, and therefore that there are a whole lot more
rational numbers than there are natural numbers. Our intuition actually fails us, though,
and what follows is Cantors famous diagonal argument.
Theorem 1. The rational numbers Q are countable.
Proof. Lets write down all of the rational numbers as a square array in a specific fashion:

Notice that each entry of a row is of the form

i
, k N, while each entry of a column is
i+k

i+k
of the form
, k N, for a fixed i. By tracing out the triangular path indicated by the
i
arrows in the diagram we obtain the following list of the rational numbers:
1 2 1 1 2 3
, , , , ,
1 1 2 3 2 1
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We can go back through this list and delete the repeated rational numbers (indicated in red)
to obtain
1 1
3
1, 2, , , 3, 4, , . . .
2 3
2
which produces a list of all of the rational numbers. This completes the proof.

Now It Gets Weird

So far weve shown that three infinite sets in particular are countable, which means that
they have the same size as the natural numbers. This conforms to our intuitive notion of
what infinity might mean as a sizetheyve all turned out to be the same. It seems, then,
that all of this has been in vain. Well, lets turn our attention to another important infinite
set, the real numbers, R. The real numbers is the set of all of the decimal numbers. Any
number on the number line is a real number. For example, is neither a natural number, an
integer, nor a rational number, but it can be written down as a decimal, so it is a real number
(in fact, is an irrational number, meaning that it cant be written down as a fraction, and
its decimal expansion never ends).
From what weve seen, we would expect that the real numbers are countable. That is, we
would expect to be able to find a way to list every single decimal number. It turns out that
the real numbers are uncountable, meaning that we could never find a way to list/count all
of the decimal numbers. So, to answer our earlier question: uncountable sets do exist! Now,
the natural numbers are infinite, and the real numbers are also infinite, but the argument
that we are about to see shows that the real numbers are strictly larger than the natural
numbers in terms of size. The next result contains one of the most surprising punchlines in
mathematics: There are multiple infinities. (In what follows, notice the elegance of Cantors
proofits strikingly simple, yet its conclusion is profound).
One quick note: Proposition 1 is equivalent to its contrapositive (reverse the hypothesis and
conclusion and negate them both): If a subset B of a set A is uncountable, then the set A
is uncountable. This is used below.
Theorem 2. The real numbers R are uncountable.
Proof. (By contradiction) By the remark above it suffices to show that the interval of real
numbers [0, 1] is not countable. Suppose that [0, 1] is countable. Then the real numbers
between 0 and 1 can be written down as a list
a1 , a2 , a3 , a4 . . . .
Let b = b0 .b1 b2 b3 b4 [0, 1]. Choose b0 = 0. For the first digit, choose b1 different from the
first digit of a1 , where b1 is not 0. For the second digit, choose b2 different from the second
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digit of a2 , where b2 is not 0. For the third digit, choose b3 different from the third digit of
a3 , where b3 is not 0. Continue this process.
Then b 6= a1 , since they differ in their first digit. Also, b 6= a2 , since they differ in their
second digit. In general, b 6= ak , since b and ak differ in their kth digit. Since b0 = 0 and
none of the digits of b are 0, b 6= 0 and b 6= 1.
Thus, we have produced a decimal number, b, between 0 and 1, that does not appear in the
list of all the decimal numbers between 0 and 1. This is a contradiction.
Therefore the interval [0, 1] is not countable. By Proposition 1 it follows that the set of real
numbers R is not countable.
This completes the proof.
This remarkable theorem shows that infinity comes in at least two different sizes. The size
of the real numbers is strictly larger than the size of the natural numbers. Different
infinities exist. The size of the real numbers is called the cardinality of the continuum and is denoted by |R| = c. Later, Cantor went on to prove an even stronger result
that says that given an infinite set, we can always construct a larger infinite set out of it,
which implies an arithmetic progression of infinities. In other words, Cantors Theorem says
in effect that there are infinitely many infinities.
It might not surprise you to hear that Cantor suffered a mental breakdown in the early
20th century and spent the rest of his life in and out of mental hospitals. Cantor looked
into the abyss and something looked back. Cheap Nietzsche joke notwithstanding, Cantor
discovered these results through the simple starting point of dealing with counting a collection of objects and considering how this might extend to the infinite case. He later went
on to develop a theory of the arithmetic of infinite numbers, which he called the theory of
Transfinite Numbers.
What an achievement.