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by SublimeWarior 2883 days ago
Many mathematically-trained people fumble the infinity question because infinity is just a term or notation for something that is non-ambiguously defined. People tend to view infinity as a sort of weird, maybe even mystic, concept. Certainly the intuition behind it is useful for reasoning, but mathematically-speaking it's just a term for another formal definition.

Consider limits. One can say that a function converges to a certain value v when its input approaches infinity. This seems all subjective and mystic and non mathematically trained people would come up with all sorts of interpretation of that. But this just means that no matter how small a number ε you chose, then there exists a number x such that for any input greater than x, the function's output will be contained within v-ε and v+ε. That's it. It's as simple as that. There is no mystery to it, nor judgment. "Infinity" is just a name that is involved in such formal property.