Is there a number before infinity?
In: Mathematics
No. It’s one of the more defining features of infinity.
But in many cases, there is a number after infinity, infinity + 1.
But yeah, if we talk of positive integers and ways to expand them to cover infinity, key facts to keep in mind are,
* there are infinitely many numbers
* no integer is infinite. Even though there are infinitely many integers bigger than any limit you set, none of them are infinite. This might seem obvious but in surprisingly many cases people end up messing up by assuming “infinitegers”
* the infinity that comes after all infinitely many integers is called ω
* If we expand integers to contain ω, and numbers like ω + ω and ω^ω + 5, we get so called *surreal numbers*, expansion of real numbers.
* with surreal numbers 1 + ω = ω, but ω + 1 > ω. Order matters, adding 1 after the infinity works different than adding it before infinity.
* with all that being said, you can keep counting from infinity with little trouble, but you cannot go backwards. You can’t take one-less-than-infinity.
All this being said, infinity gets used in various ways in maths, ω is from what I can tell closest to what you were asking about, out of things maths has to offer.
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