fatvegan

I read a long post about this yesterday. But I disagree. I didn't think they made a very convincing argument. All the different justifications depended on something a bit flaky. Like infinity being equal to infinity + 1. Maybe infinity is equal to infinity + 1, but if you need that result to prove something, I don't think it's much of a result at all. I reckon I decided that 0.99999.... isn't a proper number at all. It's a construct.

You have something like this. For i = 1 to infinity add together all the (9/10^i). That's what 0.9999..... equals, exactly. Maybe if you could add together an infinite sum, you would say it was the same as 1. But you don't generally add an infinite number of things together. If you can't add an infinite number of 10s together, it's not entirely clear than you can add an infinite number of (9/10^i)s together, even though the second expression clearly smaller as you get higher. What I definitely agree with is that as the upper bound of the sum gets large, or approaches infinity, then the expression gets pretty damn close to 1.