this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
710 points (93.2% liked)

memes

10428 readers
2519 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Calculators also say that dividing by 0 is an error, but logic says that the answer is infinite. (If i recall, it's more correctly 'undefined', but I'm years out of math classes now.)

That is, as you divide a number by a smaller and smaller number, the product increases. 1/.1=10, 1/.01=100, 1/.001=1000, etc. As the denominator approaches 0, the product approaches infinity. But you can't quantify infinity per se, which results in an undefined error.

If someone that's a mathematician wants to explain this correctly, I'm all ears.

[โ€“] teletext@reddthat.com 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It approaches positive and negative infinity, depending on the sign of the denominator. The result must not be two different numbers at once, so dividing by zero cannot be defined.

There are other reasons, too, but I forgot about them.