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Geek Series: Infinity Day
History of Infinity Day: Why is it on August 8?
Who Came Up With The Idea?
Infinity Day, also known as Universal & International Infinity Day, is a commemoration held on the 8th day of the 8th month of each year to celebrate and promote Philosophy and Philosophizing for the ordinary person.
Why 8 is significant:
- 8 is the atomic number of Oxygen.
- 8 is the maximum number of electrons that can occupy a valence shell in atomic physics.
- 8 people were saved in the Flood at the time of Noah.
- 8th day: Jesus was circumcised, as the brit mila is held for Jewish boys.
- 8 is the number of legs a spider or octopus has.
- 8 is the number of planets in the Solar System. (Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet)
- 8 is 2 cubed.
- 8 follows 7 but stops before 9, making it the only non-zero perfect power that is one less than another perfect power.
- 8 is the basis of the octal system, each digit representing 3 bits. A byte is 8 bits.
- 8 displayed horizontally is the symbol of infinity; its symbol is also called a “lemniscate”: ∞
Where Did We Get The Infinity Symbol?
John Wallis was the English mathematician credited with introducing the infinity symbol and its mathematical meaning as we now know it in 1655 in his De sections conics, or “On Conic Sections.” However, he did not explain his choice of this symbol.
But Isaac Newton read his book and wrote in his Two Treatises of the Quadrature of Curves, p. 355:
‘About the beginning of my mathematical studies, as soon as the works of our celebrated countryman, Dr Wallis, fell into my hands, by considering the Series, by the Intercalation of which, he exhibits the Area of the Circle and the Hyperbola…’
