Description
The original statement of the paradox, due to Richard (1905), has a relation to Cantor's diagonal argument on the uncountability of the set of real numbers.
The paradox begins with the observation that certain expressions in English unambiguously define real numbers, while other expressions in English do not. For example, "The real number whose integer part is 17 and whose nth decimal place is 0 if n is even and 1 if n is odd" defines the real number 17.1010101..., while the phrase "London is in England" does not define a real number.
Thus there is an infinite list of English phrases (where each phrase is of finite length, but lengths vary in the list) that unambiguously define real numbers; arrange this list by length and then dictionary order, so that the ordering is canonical. This yields an infinite list of the corresponding real numbers: r1, r2, ... . Now define a new real number r as follows. The integer part of r is 0, the nth decimal place of r is 1 if the nth decimal place of rn is not 1, and the nth decimal place of r is 2 if the nth decimal place of rn is 1.
The preceding two paragraphs are an expression in English which unambiguously defines a real number r. Thus r must be one of the numbers rn. However, r was constructed so that it cannot equal any of the rn. This is the paradoxical contradiction.
Read more about this topic: Richard's Paradox
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)