Pascal's+Triangle+by+Courtney+Susskind

The infinity symbol is often referred to as the lemniscate, derived from a Latin word lemniscus, which means ribbon.

Ancient cultures had various ideas about the nature of infinity. The ancient Indians and Greeks approached infinity as a philosophical concept because they could not figure out a formal mathematical system for this. The earliest recordings of mathematical infinity came from the Greeks around 400 B.C., Zeno of Elea, a Greek philosopher is the inventor of this "dialect". The Indians believed that "if you remove a part from infinity or add a part to infinity, still what remains is infinity". Buddhist imageries show deities holding Buddhist prayer beads folded into an 8, which represents the infinite cycle of existence, of birth, death and rebirth. Later, John Wallis created the infinity symbol in 1655, based on the Greek letter ω (omega), the last letter in the Greek alphabet.