Surreal Numbers: Math Universe from Zero to Infinity

A mathematician, who spent a vacation in Norway in the early 1970s, unexpectedly felt an urgent need to write a book about the surreal numbers that he completed in a week. In his work, the whip did not invent the surreal numbers, but he was the first to systematize this term and described it in an accessible form, making work “” with standard work on this topic.

Surreal numbers is a unique mathematical structure where between With any two numbers you can add new values. For example, between 0 and 1 you can place 1/2, between 0 and 1/2 – 1/4 and so on. This process, however, does not end only with fractional values, which makes surreal numbers much more complex and interesting than a simple addition of fractions with a large denominator.

The basis of surreal numbers was laid down by a mathematician John Horton Conway, who proposed two key rules from which a huge variety of numbers follows. The first rule is that any number X is determined through two sets – left (ML) and right (MR), which contain previously created numbers, and all elements of the left set are always smaller than the right. The second rule claims that 0 is a number limited by two empty sets. Of these simple rules, a whole universe arises.

Surreal numbers are not only entire and fractional values known as diadical numbers

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