Wordie: Surreal

8 months ago seanahan said:

Knuth is an icon. He wrote the Dancing Links algorithm to solve Sudoku several years before the game was invented!

8 months ago uselessness said:

So you're saying these surreal numbers are really close to real numbers, as in "closer than infinitely close?" Uhm.

8 months ago reesetee said:

Hey, don't knock caber-tossing 'til you've tried it. Or...you know...watched it. :-)

8 months ago John said:

Wow. I'm familiar with Knuth--I've read chunks of the Art of Computer Programming and played with --but I had no idea he wrote, uh... math-based novellas. What can't the man do? Next you're gonna tell me he's a semi-pro tap dancer, and enjoys tossing the caber.

8 months ago sionnach said:

Surreal numbers are the most natural collection of numbers which includes both the real numbers and the infinite ordinal numbers of Georg Cantor. They were invented by John H. Conway in 1969. Every real number is surrounded by surreals, which are closer to it than any real number. Knuth (1974) describes the surreal numbers in a work of fiction.

That clears things right up, doesn't it?

Register or login to leave a comment.

Login:	Your login identifies you publicly, and can't contain spaces or punctuation.
Email:
Password:	Password must be at least 5 characters long.
Password again: