The Infinite Hotel Paradox - Jeff Dekofsky

In the 1920's, the German mathematician David Hilbert devised a famous thought experiment to show us just how hard it is to wrap our minds

around the concept of infinity. Imagine a hotel with an infinite

number of rooms and a very hardworking night manager. One night, the Infinite Hotel

is completely full, totally booked up

with an infinite number of guests. A man walks into the hotel

and asks for a room. Rather than turn him down, the night manager decides

to make room for him. How? Easy, he asks the guest in room number 1 to move to room 2, the guest in room 2 to move to room 3, and so on. Every guest moves from room number "n" to room number "n+1". Since there are an infinite

number of rooms, there is a new room

for each existing guest. This leaves room 1 open

for the new customer. The process can be repeated for any finite number of new guests. If, say, a tour bus unloads

40 new people looking for rooms, then every existing guest just moves from room number "n" to room number "n+40", thus, opening up the first 40 rooms. But now an infinitely large bus with a countably infinite

number of passengers pulls up to rent rooms. countably infinite is the key. Now, the infinite bus

of infinite passengers perplexes the night manager at first, but he realizes there's a way to place each new person. He asks the guest in room 1

to move to room 2. He then asks the guest in room 2 to move to room 4, the guest in room 3 to move to room 6, and so on. Each current guest moves

from room number "n" to room number "2n" -- filling up only the infinite

even-numbered rooms. By doing this, he has now emptied all of the infinitely many

odd-numbered rooms, which are then taken by the people

filing off the infinite bus. Everyone's happy and the hotel's business

is booming more than ever. Well, actually, it is booming

exactly the same amount as ever, banking an infinite number

of dollars a night. Word spreads about this incredible hotel. People pour in from far and wide. One night, the unthinkable happens. The night manager looks outside and sees an infinite line

of infinitely large buses, each with a countably infinite

number of passengers. What can he do? If he cannot find rooms for them,

the hotel will lose out on an infinite amount of money, and he will surely lose his job. Luckily, he remembers

that around the year 300 B.C.E., Euclid proved that there

is an infinite quantity of prime numbers. So, to accomplish this

seemingly impossible task of finding infinite beds

for infinite buses of infinite weary travelers, the night manager assigns

every current guest to the first prime number, 2, raised to the power

of their current room number. So, the current occupant of room number 7 goes to room number 2^7, which is room 128. The night manager then takes the people

on the first of the infinite buses and assigns them to the room number of the next prime, 3, raised to the power of their seat

number on the bus. So, the person in seat

number 7 on the first bus goes to room number 3^7 or room number 2,187. This continues for all of the first bus. The passengers on the second bus are assigned powers of the next prime, 5. The following bus, powers of 7. Each bus follows: powers of 11, powers of 13, powers of 17, etc. Since each of these numbers only has 1 and the natural number powers of their prime number base as factors, there are no overlapping room numbers. All the buses' passengers

fan out into rooms using unique room-assignment schemes based on unique prime numbers. In this way, the night

manager can accommodate every passenger on every bus. Although, there will be

many rooms that go unfilled, like room 6, since 6 is not a power

of any prime number. Luckily, his bosses

weren't very good in math, so his job is safe. The night manager's strategies

are only possible because while the Infinite Hotel

is certainly a logistical nightmare, it only deals with the lowest

level of infinity, mainly, the countable infinity

of the natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Georg Cantor called this level

of infinity aleph-zero. We use natural numbers

for the room numbers as well as the seat numbers on the buses. If we were dealing

with higher orders of infinity, such as that of the real numbers, these structured strategies

would no longer be possible as we have no way

to systematically include every number. The Real Number Infinite Hotel has negative number rooms in the basement, fractional rooms, so the guy in room 1/2 always suspects he has less room than the guy in room 1. Square root rooms, like room radical 2, and room pi, where the guests expect free dessert. What self-respecting night manager

would ever want to work there even for an infinite salary? But over at Hilbert's Infinite Hotel, where there's never any vacancy and always room for more, the scenarios faced by the ever-diligent and maybe too hospitable night manager serve to remind us of just how hard it is for our relatively finite minds to grasp a concept as large as infinity. Maybe you can help tackle these problems after a good night's sleep. But honestly, we might need you to change rooms at 2 a.m.