Who really invented infinity and that weird symbol?
Your favorite clock and time website, OnlineClock.net, is here to today try to answer this question…and it turned out to be a more difficult task than we bargained for.
Many can agree that infinity is a pretty big number. When you think about it, it has become a noun, an adjective and much more. To infinity and beyond! But what does it really mean?
It started out as a mathematical term to discuss something being infinite, such as counting all of your numbers. You start with 1 but there is no end – it just continues until, well, infinity. It has gone beyond math, though. The universe or time is also infinite. There seems to be no beginning and no end – it simply is.
So who created it? Who’s responsible for all of this infinity theory that we are so conscious about today? There is a lot of discussion and a lot of different mathematicians to consider to get to the answer because it is not very black and white.
There is a symbol that is used to represent infinity. Mathematicians love their symbols. They’ve got one for everything. Pii has a symbol, so does average, plus, division and any other mathematical term, so it’s fitting that infinity has one, too. It is the funny looking symbol that looks like a sideways 8. Appropriate considering there is no end to the loop if you were to trace it over and over again.
John "Party God" Wallis
We know for sure who created the symbol. It was a mathematician by the name of John Wallis in the 16th century. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and contributed heavily to the analysis of infinite series as well as calculus, geometry and trigonometry. He needed something to express a large number, so that symbol was created. He also went on to argue that a negative number was something larger than infinity, though that is steadily argued even today. Wallis is also credited with the number line where numbers are represented with negative numbers on the left and positive numbers increasing on the right.
The history of the infinity symbol is very easily established because it is completely definable and there are records and symbols to back it up. Now there’s the more complicated aspect of defining the actual inventor of infinity, either as a word, a theory or a mathematical equation.
The earliest notations of infinite, undefined or unbounded are by the ancient Greeks. They used the word apeiron. This is what they used to describe the chaos that the world formed from. Aristotle viewed infinity as privation. It was the absence of a limit.
Aristotle: Toga + Party = Infinity? (Nah...)
Pythagoras also associated everything with finite and infinite. Everything had to have a number. It is possible that he had to have an understanding of infinity but did he really invent it? Not really, even though he knew what it was.
The concept of infinity wasn’t Greek to them. They knew it existed because the natural world around them was being observed. They say that time had no end as well as space seemed to go on forever. Looking into the sky and simply trying to study time was all something that the Ancient Greeks were involved in, so the fact that they could come up with no beginning or see any kind of real end, it was talked about very extensively.
Isaac Newton : A guy who knew how to party with infinity
If you fast forward a few years, someone else decided to go at the whole infinity issue. Isaac Newton, an English mathematician in the late 1600s discovered calculus as a way of dealing with infinitely small numbers. Both he and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had their hand in this discovery.
Newton produced a theory on small numbers or infinitesimals as they are now known. It was in order to justify the calculation of slopes, or the change in y over the change in x for line that touches a curve. Infinitesimals are now used to define the very, very small numbers that are so immeasurably small but not quite zero, either.
Over the years, many mathematicians worked on trying to make sense of the infinity and put it into terms so that one could truly analyze the numbers and formulas with a clear understanding that if a number did go on forever that it could still be properly calculated.
Galileo: infinitely in party frame of mind
Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist in the 1600s created the Galileo’s Paradox that demonstrates the set of counting numbers can correspond with smaller sets of their squares. He concluded that “we cannot speak of infinite quantities as being one greater or less than or equal to another.”
Georg Cantor helped resolve some of the confusion about infinite numbers in 1873. He demonstrated the difference between rational numbers which are called countable or denumerable and the diagonal argument that counting numbers is less than the size of the real numbers. This is Cantor’s theorem.
George "Life of the Party" Cantor
So then do we know who created infinity? Not yet. We do know who has tried to make sense of it, though.
We can look back to see how infinity was mentioned throughout history. If we can see when it was mentioned first, it might give us an idea as to who it was that first created the idea of it.
The Upanishad is a series of philosophical texts that were recorded from around the 4th century BC that is an early start to the Hindu religion. There is the Isha Upanishad that says if you remove a part from whole or add a part to whole, still what remains is whole. This “whole” can easily be translated to mean infinity as well.
There is an Indian text dated from around 400 BC as well that classifies the three sets into enumerable, innumerable and infinite.
Around the same time, somewhere around 490BC, Zeno of Elea was speaking of mathematical infinity. None of his texts have survived the tests of time; however Parmenides and Aristotle both reference him in their worlds. He was a pre-Socratic philosopher from Southern Italy. He was apparently immeasurably subtle and very profound. He would amuse, confuse and bewilder philosophers from around the region with his paradoxes.
When you consider these two early concepts, the lines of who created what becomes even more blurred. The idea of anyone creating infinity seems to be too abstract a thought because no one created infinity simply found that the idea was possible and it became realized that an infinity exists.
So perhaps it’s time to get a little philosophical and determine what it means to invent something. Would it be the first one who discovered that it exists? Is it the first person who thought of the physical word for infinity? What about the one that could actually physically put it into mathematical use? Or the one who created the symbol, thus defining it better than any words or formulas could do?
Sources of Infinite Information:
- http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/infinity.pdf
- http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/287662/infinity
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity
- http://www.math.uconn.edu/~alozano/talks/infinity/infinityhistory.html
Considering all of these questions, it’s hard to pinpoint who is responsible for creating infinity because there are so many aspects of the term infinity that need to be thought of. We can take it question by question, thou.
The first person who discovered it existed may not even have had records or a way of expressing the idea. Anyone who can start up into the night sky can assume that it goes on forever. It becomes more of a religious or philosophical question that falls into the same realm of: Which came first – the chicken or the egg? The two seem interconnected.
It would seem that by looking at the date lines that based upon records that historians have been able to uncover that 490 BC is the absolutely earliest point that we can come up with. 490 BC is 90 years earlier than the Indian text, so it looks like the winner is Zeno of Elea. He first put the idea into play amongst philosophers. If it weren’t for him, Aristotle wouldn’t have developed his theories and so on.
The next question is the physical word for it. That would probably go collectively to the Greeks, thanks to their word “apeiron” which the English then translated into infinity. That is a whole other battle to discover who translations were made, so we can just leave it as a simple answer that the Greeks came up with the word and leave it at that.
Putting the theory of infinity into practice into math depends upon which aspect of mathematics that one is delving into. Counting would be different than the formulas of an arc, whole numbers, small numbers and of course, calculus. There are many mathematicians over the years that helped pave the path for the other mathematicians to do their work. For example, if it weren’t for the work of Isaac Newton, would Georg Cantor been able to come up with what he did?
We may not ever learn the answers to these questions – and likely won’t. So we can credit all of the mathematicians individually for each aspect of formulating infinity that they created. They all contributed to how we are able to formulate it and work with it today.
We’ve discussed the mathematical aspect of infinity, which of course is the notion that the numbers just continue forever. This principle was derived from the fact that this is what nature does, too. Time and space go on infinitely.
If we want to contemplate and come up with who created this infinity, there may be a course or two of philosophy and theology that everyone should take first. Was infinity created or does it simply exist? Considering this could be an endless question all on its own that may never get an answer.
Some may say that God created it; others may say that nature created it.
Gaia, Mother Earth, or any other entity that one may believe in could have created it as well.
Infinity is immeasurable simply because there is no end. You can open up OnlineClock.net and just stare at the seconds passing…and passing…and passing…and get an idea for this endlessness.
Mathematicians have done well at defining it and we have discovered who has had a hand, in part, at shaping the definition of infinity; but to define a single creator or inventor is…a seemingly infinite task 
Inventor of Infinity is a post from: Alarm Clock Blog, the official blog of the original Online Alarm Clock.
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