X-Message-Number: 3560
Date:  Sat, 31 Dec 94 13:47:11 
From: mike <>
Subject: CRYONICS biggest number


Yvan Bozonetti (#3551) poses the question of what is the biggest 
number you can represent using just three 9's, and (presumably) ordinary 
arithmetic connectives with the ordinary meanings.
Although 9^(9^9) would seem 
to be the reasonable answer, another, only slightly unreasonable 
answer, a still bigger "number", is 9/(9-9) = 9/0 = infinity! :-) A 
friend of mine who who works for Apple Computer has a math system 
that actually allows division by 0 so infinity is really a legitimate 
quantity (useful for some calculations, as you might imagine); also 
you can divide a finite number by infinity to get zero. To tie this 
into cryonics, I'd like to live 9/(9-9) years (AT LEAST!) and see 
cryonics as a better way to further this than certain well-known 
alternatives ...

Happy New Year!

Mike Perry. 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=3560