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Word: weierstrass (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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...tortoise would be some distance, however small, ahead. By the time Achilles reached that point, the tortoise would be a little ahead again. And so on to infinity -Achilles would never catch up. Wise & good men wrestled in vain with this prickly paradox until three 19th-Century mathematicians-Weierstrass, Bolzano and Cantor-demolished it by treating the mathematics of infinity realistically instead of mystically. They showed that an infinite class is no greater than some of its parts. The number of geometric points on a line a foot long is infinite. But the number of points on an inch...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Science: Number-Juggling | 6/10/1940 | See Source »

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