The Doctor Away Blog: How To Count Past Infinity

Saturday, June 30, 2018

How To Count Past Infinity

my twitter: @tweetsauce
my instagram: electricpants

Sources and links to learn more below!

I’m very grateful to mathematician Hugh Woodin, Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Harvard, for taking the time on multiple occasions to discuss this topic with me and help me wrap my (finite) head around it.

I’m also grateful to David Eisenbud, the Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, for his help and for connecting me with Hugh Woodin.

And of course, big thanks to Brady Haran who created the “mile of pi” seen in this video and connected me with all these mathematicians in the first place. His channel, Numberphile, is superb:

BOOKS related to these topics that I used:

“The Outer Limits of Reason” by Noson S. Yanofsky:
“Infinity and The Mind” by Rudy Rucker:
“Roads to Infinity” by John C. Stilwell:
“More Precisely: The Math You Need to Do Philosophy” by Eric Steinhart:
“Satan, Cantor and Infinity: Mind-Boggling Puzzles” by Raymond M. Smullyan:

classic book that helps introduce concept of axioms: “Introduction to the Foundations of Mathematics” by Raymond L. Wilder:

Hugh Woodin speaking about infinity at the World Science Festival:

Names of large (finite) numbers:

Geoglyphs:

The biggest number:

Fovant badges:

Battalion Park:

A mile of pi :

Wikipedia’s great visualization of ordinals out to omega^omega:

as seen on:

this is also a good page about ordinals:

also: