Showing posts with label Philip Holmes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philip Holmes. Show all posts

Thursday, August 4, 2011

Cantor Ternary Set

The second issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics has recently been posted -- with more new poemsThe first issue contained a poem by Philip Holmes about one of the most amazing collections of numbers in all of mathematics, the  Cantor Ternary SetThis set, discovered by Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) but popularized by Georg Cantor (1845-1918) consists of all the real numbers whose base 3 or ternary representations involve only the digits 0 and 2. Like a fishing net, the Cantor Ternary Set is mostly holes. "Gaps" by Philip Holmes spreads it out before us -- and reflects on what else it may represent: