Saturday, November 24, 2007

Cardinality

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.

5 comments:

Shan said...

Okay, I had crepuscular, you have aleph-naught.

You win.

clumsy ox said...

It's not a contest, Shan. But I was darn proud of my little girl.

Eryn said...

ok, for us mere mortals, are you going to tell us what that means?

clumsy ox said...

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?

Shan said...

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.