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06695_Field_TCUM T260.txt
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1996-04-10
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lineal waiting had done centuries earlier.
A main fact about numbers has now been reached, with
the link between the medieval positional zero and the
Renaissance vanishing point. That both vanishing point and
infinity were unknown in the Greek and Roman cultures can be
explained as byproducts of literacy. It was not until printing
extended the visual faculty into very high precision, uniformity,
and intensity of special order that the other senses could be
restrained or depressed sufficiently to create the new
awareness of infinity. As one aspect of perspective and
printing, mathematical or numerical infinity serves as an
instance of how our various physical extensions or media act
upon one another through the agency of our own senses. It is
in this mode that man appears as the reproductive organ of
the technological world, a fact that Samuel Butler bizarrely