As far as I can tell, their notion of uncountable is the same thing as mass nouns (aka uncountable nouns) like dust, milk, or happiness. On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 10:59 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I just heard lecture last Sunday about the *Jain* religion, and was astonished to hear that it incorporates the concepts of both "infinity" and "countable" v. "uncountable" in its vocabulary.
I did a quick Google search, but couldn't find out very much about the intersection of the Jain religion and Indian mathematics.
I don't think that Ramanujan was Jain, but he certainly would have known something of the Jain religion and ideas.
If this connection holds up, then the Indian/South Asian origin of "infinity" becomes firmly established, and the Greeks must have picked it up from them.
So this begs the question: which infinity did Ramanujan know? Aleph-0, Aleph-1, omega, ???
At 08:33 PM 7/12/2016, James Propp wrote:
Hi, I started writing a new draft titled "The Man Who Knew Infinity: what the film will teach you (and what it won't)" and would love to get your feedback.
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com