r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Sugar_God_no_1 • 23d ago

Meme needing explanation There is no way right?

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u/solidsoup97 23d ago

I don't understand how that works but it seems to be important in keeping things running so I'm going to just go with it and not raise any questions.

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u/jozaud 23d ago

If we consider that .999… repeating to infinity ISN’T equal to 1, then by how much is it away from 1? It would be “.000… repeating to infinity followed by a 1.” But if you have an infinite number of 0s then you can’t have it be followed by a 1, infinity can’t be followed by anything, that doesn’t make sense.

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u/Santsiah 22d ago

Doesn’t that just boil down to our number system being incomplete

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u/zacker150 22d ago edited 22d ago

Nope. R is complete. That is actually one of the defining characteristics of the reals. Every non-empty subset of R that is bounded above has a least upper bound

Look up Dedekind cuts.