Climb into Cantor’s Attic, where you will find infinities large and small. We aim to provide a comprehensive resource of information about all notions of mathematical infinity.
View the Project on GitHub neugierde/cantors-attic
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The upper attic
The middle attic
The lower attic
The parlour
The playroom
The library
The cellar
Sources
Cantor's Attic (original site)
Joel David Hamkins blog post about the Attic
Latest working snapshot at the wayback machine
Knuth’s up-arrow notation is a notation for expressing large numbers. However, there are some numbers so large that even this up-arrow notation is not enough. You have to use Extended arrow notation.
\(a \uparrow b=a^b\)
\(a \uparrow\uparrow b=\underbrace{a^{a^{.^{.^{.^{a}}}}}}_{\text{b a’s}}\)
\(a \uparrow\uparrow\uparrow b=\underbrace{a \uparrow\uparrow a \uparrow\uparrow a\cdots\uparrow\uparrow a}_{\text{b a’s}}\)
\(a \uparrow^{n+1} b=\underbrace{a \uparrow^n a \uparrow^n a\cdots a\uparrow^n a}_{\text{b a’s}}\)
This notation is supposed to be evaluated from the right if there is more than one patch of arrows and there are no brackets.
\(3\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow3=3\uparrow\uparrow3\uparrow\uparrow3=3\uparrow\uparrow3\uparrow3\uparrow3=3\uparrow\uparrow3\uparrow27=3\uparrow\uparrow7625597484987=\)a power tower that will reach all the way to the Sun