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Questions about mathematics which don't fall into the other arXiv categories. If you have a general question about mathematics but it is not research level, it's off-topic but it might be welcomed on Mathematics Stack Exchange.

34 votes
5 answers
6k views

Where do surreal numbers come from and what do they mean?

I know about Conway's original discovery of the surreal numbers by way of games, as well as Kruskal's way of viewing surreal numbers in terms of asymptotic behavior of real-valued functions, leading …
James Propp's user avatar
  • 19.7k
24 votes
14 answers
5k views

What are some examples of "chimeras" in mathematics?

The best example I can think of at the moment is Conway's surreal number system, which combines 2-adic behavior in-the-small with $\infty$-adic behavior in the large. The surreally simplest element …
6 votes
6 answers
461 views

Procedure-based (as opposed to definition-based) concepts

Euler's work on divergent series was guided by computational procedures, rather than any definition of the "value" of such a series. E.g., he was happy to have half a dozen procedures that indicated …