• Skua@kbin.earth
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    1 month ago

    To take a joke too seriously: no, real numbers are still countable. They get infinitely small, but you can still meaningfully point to “a real number”, as opposed to how you wouldn’t point to “a water”

    • Thalfon@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      For anyone unfamiliar, it’s punning on math having its own definition of “countable”, meaning able to be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers (positive integers).

      The real numbers, as a set, are not countable in that context (Cantor’s diagonal argument is a famous and rather elegant proof), even though they are countable in the sense that grammar rules refer to.