At 3:36 AM -0800 9/13/00, Michael Everson wrote:
>Ar 14:43 -0800 2000-09-12, scr�obh Kenneth Whistler:
>>BMP: real characters
>>Plane 1: complex characters
>>Plane 2: irrational characters
>>Plane 14: imaginary characters
>
>A lovely taxonomy.
>
>Michael Everson ** Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.egt.ie
>15 Port Chaeimhghein �ochtarach; Baile �tha Cliath 2; �ire/Ireland
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>27 P�irc an Fh�ithlinn; Baile an Bh�thair; Co. �tha Cliath; �ire
Not quite accurate, though, since irrationals are a subset of the
reals, and imaginaries are complex. Mathematically, quaternions come
next in the sequence after complex numbers, followed by octonions.
This is of no help in the current case, of course.
Of course[1], there are numerous other types of numbers. Donald
Knuth's book "Surreal Numbers" describes Conway's scheme for defining
all numbers at once. This term may be of some use to us. Conway
numbers include transfinites and infinitesimals of all orders.
Numbers, in Conway's definition, turn out to be a subset of
turn-based two-person discrete games with perfect information.
In reality, of course, the Unicode code space is a very short initial
segment of the natural numbers (taken as ordinals rather than
cardinals}. Deal with it.
"Let us consider the natural numbers [begins writing on blackboard]
0,...1,...2,...oops."--From an actual math lecture, according to my
brother Gregory Cherlin, Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers
University
[1] This is the mathematician's "of course", used to introduce a fact
known only to the speaker among those present
--
Edward Cherlin, Spamfighter <http://www.cauce.org>
"It isn't what you don't know that hurts you, it's
what you know that ain't so."--Mark Twain, or else
some other prominent 19th century humorist and wit
