Gladwellian musings on love and infinity

There are as many even integers as there are integers.

We're used to being able to see a collection of objects, line them up, and count them all. But the even integers and the integers are infinite sets, and infinite sets can't be counted in the same way as finite sets. No matter how many elements of the set you've collected and decided to count in the traditional sense, there are always more elements to be counted. (All of the math here should be taken as a vast oversimplification.)

Georg Cantor showed how to compare the size of different infinite sets. The even integers and the integers are equal in size because their elements can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with each other. Why I'm writing about this, though, is because Cantor solved the major headache of infinity in mathematics by redefining infinity from the ground up.

Cantor said that something is infinite if you can remove a portion of it and what remains is just as large as the original. That, and not the fact that you'll always have more elements to count, is the definition of infinity.

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I've struggled with the definition of love, and the connection between love and logic. I didn't understand why logic can poke so many holes and yet love does not diminish. But perhaps that is the purest definition of love. When logic gives you reasons not to, but you still care every bit as much about the person. Love is that infinity.

I can't wrap my head around transfinite math, and that's okay. It's beyond real-world perception. I can't wrap my head around love, either, and maybe that's okay, too.