Neither am I a geek , nor have I ever intended to read an alphabet more than what is required of me to clear an examination, but somehow a few things in the world have always struck a chord with my thinking , for the illusion they create in my mind is more than what I could ever expect myself to handle. Infinity , for me, has been one such 'intangible' notion. Please take note of the adjective "intangible" , I would like to use it in this post with such exploitation that the word itself hoped that it rather meant something else.
The first time I was taught infinity I was in fourth grade , where it was introduced more as a stereotypical answer to "anything divided by zero ". I used to wonder sometimes what it meant, I could see my teacher stammering when she was asked to elaborate about its relevance(not by me), her face foretold that she was herself elusive , or should I say illusive of its understanding. The best she could do was to draw its symbol on the black board and assume that we were satisfied. Back then I couldn't care less.
Something I did not know myself was that it had left in me that seed of curiosity , a sub conscious one , because of which it was more inevitable that I went ahead and asked random people what it meant. I pretended to be satisfied with whatever answer I received, but deep down I knew I wasn't . I continued to ask people whatever they knew of it. Sadly, all of them seemed to know just this one thing very consistently about it: anything divided by zero is infinity. I thought to myself : Has anybody ever volunteered to break that sentence and comprehend it like a phenomenon. I mean what does anything divided by zero mean anyway? I'm sure people would like to use their baggage of knowledge, a department where I seem to lack quite immensely, and tell me " Simple hai , limit laga de , lim a->0 (b/a) " and when I would ask them what they meant ,literally, when they said limit tends to zero, they'd hug silence like they'd hug their soul mate.
Infinity was more than what it was thought to be. It was deceptive when it looked simple and exaggerated when it looked complex. It was a word created by man , and it was powerful enough to engulf the man himself. When man invented computer , he knew the computer could do only what it was told to do, it was a human slave . Infinity, on the contrary , had the power to enslave humans, its very creators. Mathematicians would literally bow down in front of a mathematical problem , if its solution tended to infinity. It had begun to be termed quite infamously :The Mathematical Devil , the Satan of Uncertainty. It was perhaps then that it was ascertained that contrary to general perception, it wasn't just an uncountable commodity , in fact it wasn't even a commodity. It was a notion , an intangible one . It could be thought but not touched, it could be felt but not calculated. It was an emotion , the depth of which was unfathomable.
The first time I was taught infinity I was in fourth grade , where it was introduced more as a stereotypical answer to "anything divided by zero ". I used to wonder sometimes what it meant, I could see my teacher stammering when she was asked to elaborate about its relevance(not by me), her face foretold that she was herself elusive , or should I say illusive of its understanding. The best she could do was to draw its symbol on the black board and assume that we were satisfied. Back then I couldn't care less.
Something I did not know myself was that it had left in me that seed of curiosity , a sub conscious one , because of which it was more inevitable that I went ahead and asked random people what it meant. I pretended to be satisfied with whatever answer I received, but deep down I knew I wasn't . I continued to ask people whatever they knew of it. Sadly, all of them seemed to know just this one thing very consistently about it: anything divided by zero is infinity. I thought to myself : Has anybody ever volunteered to break that sentence and comprehend it like a phenomenon. I mean what does anything divided by zero mean anyway? I'm sure people would like to use their baggage of knowledge, a department where I seem to lack quite immensely, and tell me " Simple hai , limit laga de , lim a->0 (b/a) " and when I would ask them what they meant ,literally, when they said limit tends to zero, they'd hug silence like they'd hug their soul mate.
Infinity was more than what it was thought to be. It was deceptive when it looked simple and exaggerated when it looked complex. It was a word created by man , and it was powerful enough to engulf the man himself. When man invented computer , he knew the computer could do only what it was told to do, it was a human slave . Infinity, on the contrary , had the power to enslave humans, its very creators. Mathematicians would literally bow down in front of a mathematical problem , if its solution tended to infinity. It had begun to be termed quite infamously :The Mathematical Devil , the Satan of Uncertainty. It was perhaps then that it was ascertained that contrary to general perception, it wasn't just an uncountable commodity , in fact it wasn't even a commodity. It was a notion , an intangible one . It could be thought but not touched, it could be felt but not calculated. It was an emotion , the depth of which was unfathomable.
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