Why in Mayan mathematics, zero and infinity are the same: a possible explanation
Author(s) -
Olga Kosheleva,
Владик Крейнович
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
applied mathematical sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1314-7552
pISSN - 1312-885X
DOI - 10.12988/ams.2013.39487
Subject(s) - infinity , zero (linguistics) , mathematics , pure mathematics , mathematical analysis , philosophy , linguistics
In Mayan mathematics, zero is supposed to be, in some sense, equal to infinity. At first glance, while this statement may have a deep philosophical meaning, it does not seem to make much mathematical sense. In this paper, we show, that this statement may be made mathematically reasonable. Specifically, on a real line, it is often useful to consider both −∞ and +∞ as a single infinity. When we deal with very small and very large numbers, it makes sense to use floating point representation, i.e., in effect, consider logarithms of the original values. In terms of logarithms, the original value 0 corresponds to −∞, while the original infinite value corresponds to +∞. When we treat both possible values −∞ and +∞ as a single infinity, we thus treat the original values 0 and ∞ as similar.
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