A couple weeks ago, my daughters were talking about something. I don't remember what it was: for the sake of argument, let's say they were talking about horses. It was a typical little kid conversation:
"I want a horse"
"I want two horses!"
"I want a hundred horses!"
My six year old pipes up: "I want aleph-nought horses!"
I was so proud.
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5 comments:
Okay, I had crepuscular, you have aleph-naught.
You win.
It's not a contest, Shan. But I was darn proud of my little girl.
ok, for us mere mortals, are you going to tell us what that means?
OK... aleph-nought is the smallest infinite number. It's actually the number of natural numbers, {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...}. So you could think of it as the highest possible non-negative integer, although "the cardinality of the set of natural numbers" is better.
Isn't that cool?
No, I didn't mean that - I meant, "well, every kid has some unusual knowledge, but I feel the math knowledge is worth more than the bio/vocab knowledge". But I realize this is just society talking, wherein math is thought to be more difficult and therefore more valuable.
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