Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Examples include: "The sequence 1, 2, 3, ... continues ad infinitum." "The perimeter of a fractal may be iteratively drawn ad infinitum." The 17th-century writer Jonathan Swift incorporated the idea of self-similarity in the following lines from his satirical poem On Poetry: a Rhapsody (1733):
An argument which does not seem to have such a beginning becomes difficult to imagine. If it can be established, separately, that the chain must have a start, then a reductio ad infinitum is a valid refutation technique. reformatio in peius: change to worse: A decision from a court of appeal is amended to a worse one.
Zeno's arguments may then be early examples of a method of proof called reductio ad absurdum, also known as proof by contradiction. Thus Plato has Zeno say the purpose of the paradoxes "is to show that their hypothesis that existences are many, if properly followed up, leads to still more absurd results than the hypothesis that they are one."
Challenging the concept of eternal recurrence (the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur ad infinitum), the story's thematic meditations posit the alternative: that each person has only one life to live and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again – thus the "lightness" of being. Moreover ...
i.e., "to the point of disgust". Sometimes used as a humorous alternative to ad infinitum. An argumentum ad nauseam is a logical fallacy in which erroneous proof is proffered by prolonged repetition of the argument, i. e., the argument is repeated so many times that persons are "sick of it". ad oculos: to the eyes
The Vermin only teaze and pinch Their Foes superior by an Inch. So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller yet to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum:
Turn-of-the-century American architect John Drinkwater begins to suspect that within this world there lies another (and within that, another and another ad infinitum, each larger than the world that contains it). Towards the center is the realm of the fairies, which his wife, the Englishwoman Violet Bramble, can see and talk with.
The book appeared the year after the publication of his essay The Literature of Exhaustion, in which Barth said that the traditional modes of realistic fiction had been used up, but that this exhaustion itself could be used to inspire a new generation of writers, citing Nabokov, Beckett, and especially Borges as exemplars of this new approach.