ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Grandi's series

Grandi's series is a math problem that involves adding up a series of numbers. Imagine that you have a big bowl of marbles, and you want to count how many there are. You start counting, "one, two, three, four..." and so on. This is a series of numbers.

Grandi's series is a special type of series that looks like this: 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1...and so on, forever. You might wonder what the answer is when you add all of those ones and negative ones together.

The problem is that there is no right answer! Some people say that the answer is 0, because if you group the ones and negative ones together, you'll always have one leftover. So, the ones will cancel each other out and you'll end up with 0.

However, other people say that the answer is 1, because if you group the ones and negative ones together in a different way, you'll end up with an extra positive one at the end. So, the series will actually equal 1.

There is actually no "correct" answer when it comes to Grandi's series, and it's a bit of a debate among mathematicians. But it's a good example of how math can be tricky and have multiple interpretations.