surreal number

Meaning

Noun

• Any element of a field equivalent to the real numbers augmented with infinite and infinitesimal numbers (respectively larger and smaller (in absolute value) than any positive real number).

Origin

• Coined by Donald Knuth in his 1974 novelette Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness. The concept had been developed by British mathematician John Conway for his game theoretic research of the board game go. Conway had simply called them numbers, but subsequently adopted Knuth's term and used it in his 1976 book On Numbers and Games.