Abstract
In Mayan mathematics, zero is supposed to be, in some sense, equal
to infinity. At first glance, while this statement may have a deep philosophical
meaning, it does not seem to make much mathematical sense.
In this paper, we show, that this statement may be made mathematically
reasonable. Specifically, on a real line, it is often useful to consider
both −∞ and +∞ as a single infinity. When we deal with very small
and very large numbers, it makes sense to use floating point representation,
i.e., in effect, consider logarithms of the original values. In terms of
logarithms, the original value 0 corresponds to −∞, while the original
infinite value corresponds to +∞. When we treat both possible values
−∞ and +∞ as a single infinity, we thus treat the original values 0 and
∞ as similar.