This is the area where I will talk about some of truth that exists behind and intertwined with the fiction.

In Chapter 7, Louella notices the benches that show the symbols of religions.  On one of the benches Louella notices a series of symbols that were made of a series of subsets of the Hebrew letter “aleph”.  What she saw was this:

In mathematics, there truly is something known as the Continuum Hypothesis.  It may not be a religion, well at least I don’t know of it as a religion…yet.  Anyway, it exists. 

What it is is this:

There are varying “sizes” of infinity.  The first infinity, , represents the cardinality of the natural numberset.  Don’t worry I’ll explain.  The natural number set is the set of all positive integers greater than 0.  So it the the set {1,2,3,4,5,6,……} by the ‘…’ we mean that the numbers continue on forever or to infinity.  The word ‘cardinality’ means the size of the set of numbers in question.

Now consider what are known as ‘real numbers’.  The real numbers not only contain the natural numbers but also contain ‘0′, the negative numbers, and ALL of the possible decimal numbers in between.  This ‘cardinality’ of this number set is larger than .  It is noted by, . 

Ok, now we have defined two types of infinite sets that have different sizes and are therefore represented by two ’sizes’ of infinity.

So the Continuum Hypothesis states that there can exist not sets that have a cardinality between  and .  Some mathematicians agree with this others do not.  So here we have created our basis for a chasm in the contrived religion of mathematics.

Next time I will talk about the Axiom of Choice which forms the basis for the Continuum Hypothesis.

-Gabe Roger