While the concept of infinity may seem mysterious, mathematicians have developed processes to reason the strange properties of infinity. Mathematician Emily Riehl has been challenged to explain infinity to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert.
Director: Maya Dangerfield
Producer: Wendi Jonassen
Director of Photography: Ben Finkel
Editor: Louville Moore
Host: Emily Riehl
Level 1: Samira Sardella
Level 2: Eris Busey
Level 3: Yoni Singer
Level 4: Elliot Lehrer
Level 5: Adriana Salerno
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas
Production Manager: Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Larry Greenblatt
Gaffer: Randy Feldman
Audio: Ken Pexton
Production Assistant: Andrea Hines
Hair/Makeup Artist: Haki Pope Johns
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Paul Tael
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Comments
28 responses to “Mathematician Explains Infinity in 5 Levels of Difficulty | WIRED”
That 9yr old is awesome! Holy moly, did not expect that.
Her side profile looks like Graham Stephan
Level 1-3 👌🏼
Level 4 🫥🤯
Grad level explanation was more technical and more difficult than Expert level, which was just superficial philosophizing.
I love how fresh the fade of the mathematician is ❤ She‘s got the same priorities as me I guess 🥹
I loved how enthusiastic she sounds! She talks with such passion about this! Sadly my brain went blank when She started to discuss non Euclidean spaces with the grad student! 😂😂😂
I learned about sizes of infinity in school and never got a real example of how it matters in the real world. It seems like a mix of philosophy and logic puzzles. Who can solve this problem that doesn’t really exist. The concept of infinity is useful I get that, but different sizes of infinity? How is that useful to know and what can we do with that knowledge?
Mathematician : How many candies do you think are in this jar?
Me: thinking in exact hundreds
Little Girl: 217
Girl what.
The child is incredibly intelligent. Amazed by her intuition for infinity!
The girl is answering the questions even more than I am right here😭…. I'm in college and I want to believe I'm not dumb😂💀
This is very handy. I will show this to my daughter. She asked me to explain infinity a few days ago and I told her it was a never-ending number. She wanted to know if there was a number bigger than infinity and I told her there wasn't. Then she asked how people count to infinity and the cycle of questions continued. Hopefully, this video answers her lingering questions.
10:07 When she said like we can map a interger grid (ZXZ) to a unique real to prove that the cardinality of reals is bigger than cardinality of integers. But when we map (1,1) and (2,2) maps to same real number 1. Means it's not bijective then how can we argue that the cardinality of the integer grid is same as cardinality of real?
Or is she using some different kind of mapping function not (p,q) -> p/q?
if i have a finite number of balls(two) inside an infinite number of cups, Do i have Infinity squared balls? or do i have just Infinite balls? and infinite cups ?
I love the number guesses of the child. But one can tell that the child is super intelligent and absolutely got the concept.
infinity is everyday in the stupidity of collage students
I think that Infinity is the number that the annoying kid use.For example:Like you gotten 5 points and the annoying kids says I guess I got more than you than you say a higher number like a googol or something than the annoying kids say My point is still higher than yours.So basically you can’t have more points than the annoying kid 😂😂😂
(Btw he is the son of the people in the math problems😂😂😂)
Dr. Riehl is so awesome!
I am the 100000th view🗿
First girl is so smart
Love the 9yo child. She’s so smart for her age. “How many jars do you need?”, instantly answers: “infinite amount of jars” 1:37 😮
The 9 year old is smarter than the Karens shouting at Walmart staffs
I've never seen so many people having their minds genuinely blown on camera before
I've never seen so many people having their minds genuinely blown on camera before
Natural numbers don't include zero so the matching process is kinda dodgy but nevertheless interesting concept
Hearing a mathematician say that mathematics are really man-made and we are using a lot of operations and rules as a foundation, although they may technically not be the best makes me feel really proud of the 15yo me asking himself the same question. I hope we someday get to the point where our math foundations are sufficient to get even further than we are now.
probably one of the smartest 9 year-old i have ever seen
Many people keeps saying the child is brilliant but in my opinion the college student was awesome to me because he answered every question correctly
I hate math because I'm really bad at it. This actually made me interested listening about infinity.