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Re: Calculus XOR Probability

Subject: Re: Calculus XOR Probability
From: Virgil
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 14:45:16 -0600
Newsgroups: sci.math
In article <MPG.1e9dd8e096dfe76398abee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Tony Orlow <aeo6@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


> Han's original point is that calculus is very precise and works, whereas the 
> case where you have a uniform probability distribution over an infinite set 
> of 
> possibilities is not well handled by the classical notion that all individual 
> probabilities sum to 1, because the individual probabilities are considered 
> equal to zero. It is the opinion of both of us that this can be resolved, 
> among 
> other ways, by assigning infinitesimal nonzero probabilities to each 
> possibility, leaving intact the notion that the sum of the individual 
> probabilities sums to 1. I am not sure why this is roundly rejected. Can you 
> address that?

Because there is no model of the reals, either standard or nonstandard, 
in which the sum of countably many equal values can equal 1.

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