Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
[surreal numbers]
> Care to explain what those are, O great math teacher?
Surreal Number theory was an attempt in the latter half of the
twentieth century to unify several existing sets of numbers (including
the complex numbers, generalized epsilon numbers, and cardinalities)
into a single notation and define addition and multiplication
operations on them that would be isomorphic to the standard addition
and multiplication on the complex numbers. Knuth's book on them is
very interesting and a good read.
I don't know whether surreal numbers ever really caught on in the
mainstream mathematics community or lead to any real advances in
number theory. Most undergraduate math curricula don't seem to teach
them as near as I can tell, except perhaps in the collateral reading.
One problem with them is that the notation is rather unwieldy. They
are interesting conceptually, however, despite their apparent lack of
practical usefulness, and serve as a proof of concept for the notion
of a unified number theory, although in practice the group theory of
modern algebra seems to unify things better, IMO.
Hey, you asked.
Surreal numbers in Perl would be way more cool than practical.
--
$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,"[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ --";$\=$ ;-> ();print$/
