quote:

The engineer replies that he will get close enough for engineering purposes

Hrdee har de har

Regards

Jeff,

I will yield one point. That in my 76 years of living it has been my experience that atheist women are more interested in sex than Christian women. And, no , I have never had a relationship with a Muslim woman and cannot comment.

I have wondered why Muslim women wear those awful clothes.

Regards,

quote:

1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 1, which is a finite amount of time.

No. There would have to be an infinite number of iterations to reach 1. In any finite number of iterations, you'd be close to 1 but would never reach it, which is the point of the joke. No human being can do an infinite number of iterations.

Well, I used to--but then the drugs wore off.

Jeff

Jeff you said,

quote:

No. There would have to be an infinite number of iterations to reach 1.

Says I cannot go to the local grocery store.

Ummmmmmmmmmm, yet I eat.

Regards,

If the iteration time is halved with each iteration with no overhead other than that, then the series 1/2+1/4+1/8+etc. would add up to 1. If there's an overhead per iteration that doesn't approach zero, it wouldn't - i.e., if the person has to actually count the number of iterations, that would keep it from being successful. Or something like that.

The point of the story is that you need an infinite number of iterations to actually get there, mathematically speaking, and there's no way to DO an infinite number of iterations. The sequence equals one ONLY at infinity; until then you're only close.

Heck, it's just a joke, and you know what I mean.

It reminds me of my favorite simple proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Suppose the number of primes is finite. List them. Multiply them together, then add one. The new number isn't divisible without remainder by any of those numbers you've listed, so either it's a prime that isn't in the list already, or there's some prime not in the list that will divide it without remainder. Either way, there's a prime number you haven't listed. Thus the number of primes is infinite.

That proof may have made me a mathematician, by the way.

Jeff

From the physical standpoint the texture of the surface is also important. If the surfaces are hairy, and you define the surfaces for measurement as flat, then the hairy portions would touch eventually.



Donald

Jeff,

quote:

That proof may have made me a mathematician, by the way.

Neat proof. Thanks for sharing.

Regards,