There has to be some procedure how to come up with "new" numbers though, if you want to have more in the end than just a fancy binary tree - in particular if you want to map your "fake numbers" to the reals, infinity, etc.
There has to be some procedure how to come up with "new" numbers though, if you want to have more in the end than just a fancy binary tree - in particular if you want to map your "fake numbers" to the reals, infinity, etc.
This procedure is enough. If you define addition and other operations in a certain way (as Conway did), it turns out that on the omega-th day (i.e. after initial infinite steps), all reals will be born.