What kind of fuckery is this?
- The eternal question, rendered by ever-exquisite Amy Winehouse
Representation of the ordinal numbers up to ωω. Each turn of the spiral represents one power of ω ( the smallest infinite ordinal).
More beautiful math. I wish I had been taught math differently in school. There is something extraordinarily lovely about it to me now. In elementary/high school, unlike words and letters, numbers were just fear and confusion and mercury-like slippery sliding across the page and out of my brain.
The kind of barely imaginable *fuckery* of math is still there, just really trixy at the advanced level, and hence can be interesting, in a way eg:
Any ordinal is defined by the set of ordinals that precede it: in fact, the most common definition of ordinals identifies each ordinal as the set of ordinals that precede it. For example, the ordinal 42 is the order type of the ordinals less than it, i.e., the ordinals from 0 (the smallest of all ordinals) to 41 (the immediate predecessor of 42), and it is generally identified as the set {0,1,2,…,41}.
James Joyce is a light-weight with words compared to this stuff.
(more cats and nudes soon, promise)