Julio: > Sabri's mathematician gave up because he interpreted continuity the wrong > way.
Actually, I formulated the problem in the wrong way: the mathematician could have been right. I did not tell you the distance between the princess and the competitors, and the length of the initial step of each man could have taken. Depending on these, it may be possible for one man or both to reach the princess in a finite number of steps or the other way around. But when it comes to what Michael L said, we neither know the distance between us and the target, nor the length of the initial step when can take, even if the each of the next steps will be half of the previous one. So, math does not work here, because we do not know what exactly the problem is. Maybe poetry would help and this is one of my favorite poems from Turkey, and the poet is not even a poet, he was a writer of satire: My father Abdulaziz Efendi Searched for a treasure throughout his life As if himself buried it No one else knew where it was buried Before finding what he searched for Exhausted in his eighty-three I come from a diggers' family Some of us dig for gold, some of us for love Yet, all of us in our hearts have this fantasy I know I can never find it But still search for the nonexistent And die before finding it, just like my daddy Our kind is going extinct as the time goes by my son Continue this inheritance from our past Don't let this arthritis dry for the humankind Even if you know there does not one, search for a treasure imagined in your mind For to live is to search for the treasure buried in your heart Aziz Nesin, 1983 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
