In soccer first you learn levitation, then telepathy

Defining Infinity

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The best introduction to infinity and how to think about it comes from the book “Everything and More” by David Foster Wallace.

“Beware of thinking that infinity is just an incredibly, unbelievably enormous number. There are, of-course, many such numbers, especially in physics and astronomy…”

Infinity is a way to define a specific kind of endlessness. The way we might divide something over and over by 2, and get smaller and smaller numbers.

“Take the single most ubiquitous and oppressive feature of the concrete world – namely that everything ends, is limited, passes away- and then conceive, abstractly, of something without this feature”

Infinity is a concept, it is not a big number. And it has implications in how we think about technology and innovation. But first, a quick demo of how to think about infinity.

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The Number Line

The number line is how we usually visualize infinity.

1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 …. all the way up to infinity.

Unfortunately, the number line is actually very messy. Between 1 and 2 is an infinity of possible numbers. Same with all the possible numbers between 3 and 4.

½, ¼, 1/16, 1/100th, 1/1000th – you get the idea – it never ends, and infinity can exist in between the spaces of every number.

Infinity is just a way of saying, “There are endless possibilities in finite space”.

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Design, Infinity and Kenya Hara

I started reading Kenya Hara’s book “Designing Design” at the beginning of December. In it, he uses infinity to explain an idea that, for me, wins the award for “Biggest Insight of the Year”.

As stated above, In-between every number are an endless array of possible numbers.

Kenya Hara’s point about creativity and innovation is almost mathematical.

“Raising our point of view regarding daily life is like discovering decimals. The Future is not where everyone looks for it, ‘there’, right after the present. It’s not an integral number in a line: 9,10,11…. It’s somewhere like 6.8 or 7.3.”

And this is where it gets interesting….

“The new design scene nestled in ordinary life will be created by the intellect that perceives the unlimited numbers between any two successive integers”.

For me, this is the greatest insight coming out of last years work. Infinity is a concept that is a primordial component of our creativity. It is the ability to see something new within our everyday minutiae.

Happy New Year 🙂

Nick

Books mentioned in this post.

Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace

Designing Design, by Kenya Hara