>But it remains odd to me that you can say that 0.999...=1. (Which is
>essentially what you were saying.) The "0.999..." is not a fixed value, but
>rather it is a process that continues indefinitely, always changing
>(dynamic). Whereas the "1" is a fixed value and never changes (static). So
>how can they be equal?
>
>Maybe they aren't equal, as Peter suggests. Perhaps the way you phrased it
>is best (with minor changes to the numbers to follow my example), "In other
>words 0.999... + X is greater than 1 no matter how small X is." This
>maintains the sense of what is happening more clearly than saying that
>0.999...=1.
Isn't this the same philosophical problem that mathematicians had with
Newton (and Leibniz)'s infintesimal calculus? The 0.999...vanishes among
Berkeley's "ghosts of departed quantities". And surely it isn't reasonable
to say that 1 is static and 0.999... is a dynamic process - 1 could equally
be represented as an indefinite process 1.000... couldn't it?
James
[flunked maths at 16]
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