They have to do with the nature of infinity. The most well known is the Runner's. If a runner thinks that a race is about going to the midpoint of the race and then the midpoint after that, he'll never finish. He'll complete 50%, then 75%, but will never reach the finish line. He can only get infinitely close.
Chat with our AI personalities
Zeno was probably born in Alexandria, Egypt.
The earliest attestable accounts of mathematical infinity come from Zeno of Elea (c. 490 BCE? - c. 430 BCE?), a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy
Thales, Eucleides, Aristarchus, Zeno of Elea, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Aristarchus of Syracuse, Chilon of Lakedemon, Solon, Protagoras are an indicative list of philosophers - founders of the mathematics science.
In the naive set theory of the nineteenth century, the term universal set referred to the set of all sets. If one was doing set theory with objects that were not sets (these are sometimes called urelements), those were included in the universal set as well. However, Bertrand Russell and others discovered that this concept leads to paradoxes, such as the set of all sets not members of themselves (the universal set being a member of itself), which is a member of itself if it is not, and not a member of itself if it is. So axiomatic set theories were developed to hopefully avoid these paradoxes. It was also discovered that urelements are not necessary to do set theory that can be used as the basis of all areas of mathematics. In a more limited context, the term universal set or universe of discourse is used to refer to the set of things being discussed and studied. For example, in the area of the mathematical study of integers (positive and negative whole numbers), the set of all integers is the universe of discourse. This seems to be harmless in that it does not lead to paradoxes, as far as is known.
Infinity is not a number. There are different classes of infinity: The sets of natural numbers, integers, rational numbers all belong to the smallest class, with a cardinality of Aleph-null. The sets of irrational numbers and real numbers belong to the next higher level of infinity, with cardinality Aleph-One. Infinity can give rise to a very large number of apparent paradoxes - infinitely many of them?