Dream diary for math geeks

[hudebnik]

I was visiting a foreign country, meeting the locals, walking along the beach, watching a bicycle race... but the thing I remember most about the foreign country is that they had a different number theory. The only sets that existed were those that we would say have power-of-2 cardinality; there was no "successor" function, but only a "twinning" function in which every element of a set is replaced with two copies of itself. Now, of course, there were occasionally three or five of something, and the inhabitants knew that, but they considered such sets to be not really legitimate, as one can't perform even the most basic mathematical operations on such a pathological set.

Oh, and they did have real numbers, to handle continuous measurements (e.g. how far up or down the beach the waves came); there was just nothing corresponding to what we call the (non-power-of-2) integers.

Comments

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Not familiar with it. I've read one or two Cherryh books, years ago....