The depressive episode I started yesterday persists, but has been much less severe today. This afternoon I finished the last few chapters of The Joy of X without too much struggle. Now I will have to find a new book for my light math reading. I have several options in my library already, but I would welcome recommendations, as well.
The final chapter of The Joy of X was about infinity and included a treatment of Cantor’s diagonal argument that the set of real numbers is uncountable. (I’m sorry, non-specialist readers, but I’m not up to explaining what that is right now, though it is fairly accessible.) The Joy of X did not account in any way for the fact that some numbers have more than one decimal representation (e.g. that $0.1\overline{0}=0.0\overline{9}$). I’m sure a more formal presentation of the argument would have. I intend to think for a while about how I would do it before looking up the accepted method. Not today, though.1
- To do. ↩︎
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