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Is infinity an odd or even number? (2011)

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Re: Is infinity an odd or even number? (2011)

#8
In IEC 60559* floating-point arithmetic, pow(-1, ∞) is 1.

This is because all large binary and decimal floating-point numbers are even, and thus so is infinity.

*this is the successor standard to ieee-754 and shares text in recent revisions, though I don't have direct access on this phone. You can find the specific pow specification in Annex F of the C99 standard.

Re: Is infinity an odd or even number? (2011)

#10

  In my experience with children, one of the easiest-to-grasp concepts of infinity is provided by the transfinite ordinals, since it can be viewed as a continuation of the usual counting manner of children, but proceeding into the transfinite:
  1,2,3,⋯,ω,ω+1,ω+2,⋯,ω+ω=ω⋅2,ω⋅2+1,⋯,ω⋅3,⋯,ω2,ω2+1,⋯,ω2+ω,⋯⋯
Presumably this person has no experience with 6 year olds? This explanation is horrendous haha
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