Adopey.1984 net.math utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!unc!dopey.bts Fri Mar 19 10:44:09 1982 You Can Too Be A Math Genius I'm a little disappointed by all the attacks on davy's "You Too Can Be A Math Genius". I found it upsetting when, long ago in elementary school, a teacher told me that .9999... was the same thing as 1. The argument that they must be the same since I can't tell you what their differ- ence is-- except for conceding it to be 0-- is far from con- vincing. I can't write down a name for most real numbers, but that's no reason to doubt their existence. In defense of the naive intuition that davy and I-- and perhaps others who won't admit to it-- once shared, I've written up a short description of how to try to formalize the belief that .9999... is "almost the same, but a little less". It's just over 100 lines, and it mentions such nasty things as "ultrafilters" and the like. Still, I don't think there's anything in it grossly wrong or likely to cause cancer in readers. It follows after this warning. Bruce T. Smith, UNC-CH (...!duke!unc!bts) ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.