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by Farino on December 29th, 2005

Farino

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Why is the lemniscate or mobius strip symbol used to represent infinity?

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  • by n_o_u_s on January 6th, 2006

    n_o_u_s

    The precise origins of the infinity symbol [infty] are unclear. One possibility is suggested by the name it is sometimes called — the lemniscate, from the Latin lemniscus, meaning "ribbon". One can imagine walking forever along a simple loop formed from a ribbon.

    A popular explanation is that the infinity symbol is derived from the shape of a Möbius strip. Again, one can imagine walking along its surface forever. However, this explanation is improbable, since the symbol had been in use to represent infinity for over two hundred years before August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing discovered the Möbius strip in 1858.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol#Infinity_symbol

    John Wallis is usually credited with introducing infty as a symbol for infinity in 1655 in his De sectionibus conicus. One conjecture about why he chose this symbol is that he derived it from a Roman numeral for 1000 that was in turn derived from the Etruscan numeral for 1000, which looked somewhat like CIƆ and was sometimes used to mean "many". Another conjecture is that he derived it from the Greek letter ω (omega), the last letter in the Greek alphabet.

    The infinity symbol is represented in Unicode by the character ∞ (∞).

    The lemniscate was first described in 1694 by Jakob Bernoulli as a modification of an ellipse, which is the locus of points for which the sum of the distances to each of two fixed focal points is a constant. A lemniscate, by contrast, is the locus of points for which the product of these distances is constant. Bernoulli called it the lemniscus, which is Latin for 'pendant ribbon'.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemniscate

    The Möbius strip or Möbius band is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. It has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It was co-discovered independently by the German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moebius_strip

    picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MobiusStrip-01.png

    Edit: An alternate way of writing lower case omega is omega with a line over it which looks similar to the infinity symbol. As Alatea noted "the Etruscan sign CD, signifying 1000"; 8 is 1000 in binary.

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