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In Our Time: Science
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The Greeks Banished Infinity From Their Mathematics
The Greeks were afraid of infinity in many ways. They effectively banished all notion of infinity from their mathematics. And would only consider finite processes, which could be big but couldn't go on forever. Jakob Bernoulli was first discovered thinking about compound interest. He wondered what would happen if interest was added constantly. So rather than twice or three times, it's added infinitely many times.
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