The character used to represent infinity is known as the lemniscate (from the Latin for ribbon-- think "Moebius strip").
Transfinite numbers are what one (completely insane, to my mind) mathematician came up with in order to do math with infinite numbers. (What, infinity isn't mind-boggling enough for you, you have to learn to juggle with it, too?)
And Matt and I are couple of the geekiest geeks ever to walk the earth. A small snippet of an IM conversation:
Me: Oh yes I am.
Matt: Are not.
Me: R2.
Matt: !R
Me: R2^2!
Matt: !R^(Gris's number +1)
...I'll let you figure out why I wound up looking up stuff on infinity. And no, for future reference, the Unicode ∞ *won't* render in IM. I guess it's just funny that way.
Posted by gris at August 11, 2005 11:05 PM