I cannot understand how there are “larger infinities than others” no matter how hard I try.

1.61K viewsMathematicsOther

I have watched many videos on YouTube about it from people like vsauce, veratasium and others and even my math tutor a few years ago but still don’t understand.

Infinity is just infinity it doesn’t end so how can there be larger than that.

It’s like saying there are 4s greater than 4 which I don’t know what that means. If they both equal and are four how is one four larger.

In: Mathematics

34 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine you are standing on the edge of an infinite forest. This forest has an infinite number of trees, assume they are 1 m apart for simplicity. Now, the floor of the forest is covered with infinite grass. And grass is so much finer than trees, that between any pair of trees, there is an infinite amount of grass between them.

The analogy is that trees are integers, grass is real numbers. Both are infinite, but the latter a lot more so.

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