jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2005
- Messages
- 24,532
Thank you.
Doron, it appears that you are the one using symbolic-only reasoning. You seem to claim that since you can never write down all the a, b, c, d etc. symbols because there are infinitely many of them, the horizontal arrow in your illustration can never reach the right edge of the large square. But if you use visual reasoning, you see that it in fact does.
The terms a, b, c, d.. form an infinite geometric series, the sum of which is well known. It's X in this case.
So, using both visual AND symbolic reasoning we find that X=a+b+c+d+...
Hevneren,
Welcome to the ISF.
You may quickly come to realize that Doronshadmi has his own views about what Mathematics should be like. He has made seemingly odd statements like 2 is not a member of the set {2} and 1/4 and 0.25 are different numbers.
"Disproving" Cantor is a frequent theme.
He has an ample supply of diagrams he will cycle through. They apparently are very meaningful to Doronshadmi, and he will make sweeping statements about them, but he'll always fail to explain how they support this argument, just that they do.
As for the current diagram, it isn't hard to see what is going on. Doronshadmi has stumbled across a well-known paradox involving limits and the diagonal; without understanding the paradox, he believes it dismisses established conclusions about infinite series.
Getting Doronshadmi to explain his reasoning with any substance, however, will be impossible.