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[Andrew Lewis]

Hmmm... Lets see what simon singh (crypto-dudeologist and mathematician) 
has to say about this....

http://www.monkeysailor.co.uk/lug has the answers you seek!

episode 5 for the lowdown on infinity... and am I alone in thinking that 
1+purple is a perfectly valid sum as long as the result is another 
imaginary number (possibly called Frank or Desmond)

Monkeysailor

Peter Oliver wrote:

> On Thu, 26 May 2005, sparkes wrote:
>
>> The phrase tends towards infinity really screws with people who haven't
>> done the groundwork.  Once infinity is around is the answer always
>> infinity?
>
>
> There doesn't have to be an answer.  Some things are just statements. 
> You don't have to see everything maths related as an exercise given by 
> the teacher to be worked out.
>
> People think maths is all about "sums", because that's what they did 
> in maths lessons at school, and that more advanced maths must be about 
> harder sums.  Well, you do a lot of spelling tests in school English 
> lessons, but literature is not the same thing as spelling, even though 
> you need the latter to create the former.
>
>> 1 + infinity = infinty seems to make sense
>
>
> Not to me it doesn't.  We define how the function "addition" works on 
> numbers.  Remember what I said about infinity not being a number?  I 
> meant it.  Here, 1 + infinity makes about as much sense as 1 + purple.
>
> Of course, if you want to you can go ahead and define any function you 
> like.  Lets define a new function called addition_sparkes (overloaded 
> onto the plus operator) such that n + infinity = infinity for all n.  
> This doesn't seem to be of much use to me.  You can't define the 
> related subtraction_sparkes so that the algebra you know and love 
> still works; you'd need infinity - infinity = n for whatever n you 
> thought of.
>