The Ross-Littlewood Paradox
You add ten balls and remove one, infinitely many times. At the end, the vase is empty. What happened to all the balls?
19887 min read
American applied probability and statistics
Sheldon Ross
1943
Probabilist and author of widely used textbooks in probability and stochastic processes. His name is attached to the Ross-Littlewood paradox, a supertask thought experiment about a vase and numbered balls, which he popularised as a vehicle for exploring the mathematics of infinite sets and the limits of classical notions of convergence. His textbooks, including A First Course in Probability, have introduced the subject to generations of students.