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Letter: Letter

Published 7 April 2001

From Ken Moore

Everyday structures—houses, offices and airports, for example—are
essentially empty spaces. Only a small proportion of the occupied space is the
structure.

It’s easy to think of many beautiful structures whose elements occupy a tiny
proportion of the available space.

So is Chaitin really casting mathematics into disarray? Number theory, for
example, was not exactly cast into disarray by the realisation that there is a
more than infinite— a transinfinite—number of numbers between
any two integers.

Zurich

Issue no. 2285 published 7 April 2001

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