I saw this Reddit post today saying "My son's third-grade teacher taught my son that 1 divided by 0 is 0. I wrote her an email to tell her that it is not 0. ...
If your counter against that is that 0 will never become 1 no matter how many you add, then that just proves ‘infinite’ correct. If it ever could, it wouldn’t be infinite…
You’re confusing infinity for unreal numbers. Infinity and negative infinity are not real numbers, but not all unreal numbers are infinity or negative infinity.
If you’re strictly adding zeros, then adding infinite zeros nets you zero. If adding zero once didn’t change the result, then adding it infinite times won’t either. If you need to add enough zeros to get to 1, that number doesn’t exist - but that doesn’t mean that it’s infinity, it means that there’s no solution. Infinity is a placeholder for “larger a real number than you can imagine”, but when you multiply that by zero, the magnitude of infinity is a moot point because you have zero infinities.
In calculus if you’re curious, you’re usually not strictly adding zero itself like above but instead adding values that approach zero. In that case, 0*infinity really “a very small number times a really big number”, and that is called an “indeterminate form”. In that case you may try rearranging it to solve
You say it yourself. If you keep adding infinite zeros you will never get 1, hence the ‘divided by 0’ part.
Also, 0 is technically not a number either, it’s the concept of the absence of one. You can’t count 0 things. That doesn’t mean we don’t use it, though. It’s just less hard to imagine and closer to our basic calculations than infinity is.
You’re confusing infinity for unreal numbers. Infinity and negative infinity are not real numbers, but not all unreal numbers are infinity or negative infinity.
If you’re strictly adding zeros, then adding infinite zeros nets you zero. If adding zero once didn’t change the result, then adding it infinite times won’t either. If you need to add enough zeros to get to 1, that number doesn’t exist - but that doesn’t mean that it’s infinity, it means that there’s no solution. Infinity is a placeholder for “larger a real number than you can imagine”, but when you multiply that by zero, the magnitude of infinity is a moot point because you have zero infinities.
In calculus if you’re curious, you’re usually not strictly adding zero itself like above but instead adding values that approach zero. In that case, 0*infinity really “a very small number times a really big number”, and that is called an “indeterminate form”. In that case you may try rearranging it to solve
You say it yourself. If you keep adding infinite zeros you will never get 1, hence the ‘divided by 0’ part.
Also, 0 is technically not a number either, it’s the concept of the absence of one. You can’t count 0 things. That doesn’t mean we don’t use it, though. It’s just less hard to imagine and closer to our basic calculations than infinity is.
Zero is a real number, but not a natural number. I’m not going to explain the difference because, dude, this is junior high math
Indeed, and infinite isn’t… It’s like comparing Newton and Einstein on a regular earth scale.
Right, infinity is late high-school, early university math.
Also not really relevant but you know that elementary mechanics approximates the theory of relatively at regular earth scale?