# [Marxism] Fermat, infinity, and the integers (was Reply to Les)

Les Schaffer schaffer at optonline.net
Tue Apr 27 15:21:40 MDT 2004

gdunkel at mindspring.com wrote:

>Every positive integer has a successor.  Infinity doedsn't.  Infinity is not a positive integer.
>

which derives from the classic Peano definition/construction of the
natural number system: start with 1 and an operation called 'add', and
add 1 (call it 2), add 1 (call it 3),  etc etc

infinity could be __attached__ to the integers via a projection
technique, tho i've never seen this done in any discussions of N. but as
greg points out, its suddenly a very different type of system (with that
one peculiar point).

question: is infinity even or odd?
question: is infinity prime?
question: does infinity have a unique prime factorization?

etc

Donal: will reply to you tmw on QM and "materialist interpretations"
Jurriaan: will reply to transformation comments tmw. care to give me a
one paragraph definition of the transformation problem?

Les

p.s. Jurriaan: maths people often use \infty for the infinity symbol in
plan text discussions. it originates with the TeX software program of
Donald Knuth, used to typeset math and physics papers. so Fermats (your
version) would be coded like so:

x^\infty + y^\infty = z^\infty

use this notation and people will think you're a pro.



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