Encounters with Infinity

The original title of this manuscript was Pages - A Voyage to Infinity. It's kinda like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; a collection of poems with an underlying mystical theme. My dissertation is a kaleidoscope puzzle of images and thoughts and concepts and ideas taken from mysticism, science, logic, and mathematics. The end result, as the puzzle pieces are linked together, is a new portrait of Number. The reader is challenged to solve a conceptual picture puzzle using the chaotic scattering of puzzle pieces set forth in the thesis. Some of the pieces challenge established ideas. Some of the pieces are decoys leading to dead ends. Some are background. Others are transition pieces. And, there are pieces that give the reader glimpses of me, the writ er of this thesis. So, exact ly what is infinit y? As the pieces of the puzzle are put together a new concept of infinity emerges, a concept that may be of interest to the mystics, the philosopher, the quantum physicist, and mathematicians who are open to a new window through which to view reality.