this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Anything /0 is considered impossible as an agreement. There's no actual math involved in that answer. In reality you can divide by 0, but the answer has no natural number.
How many times can you add 0 before you get 1? The answer actually is the drunk(๐ ) 8 or 'infinite', but our minds can't grasp the very existence of infinite, so we just went with 'impossible'.
There are ways to circumvent that added concept of some calculators when dividing by 0 anyway and it will show you "Infinite" if it is able to. I remember you could do this in C+ even, but not 100% sure anymore how. I think it was with dividing by an ever decreasing number-variable. When it reaches 0 just before the calculation, C+ didn't default to an error, but just said 'Infinite'. But like I said, not 100% sure anymore if that was the actual way.
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...
Sooo, this guy is smart, but also wrong in his calculation here. ๐
Edit: Anyway, voting me down doesn't change the inconvenient truth above. ๐
the limit of y in 1/x=y as x approaches 0 from negative one is negative infinity. the limit as x approaches 0 from positive one is positive infinity. 1/0 is simultaneously both positive and negative infinity and is paradoxical.
One could argue that negative and possitive infinity, unlike natural numbers, boils down to the same thing, though. Just like 0, infinity technically has no + or -.
Don't think of infinity as a value. It's more of a concept to explain numerical behavior. What you described would be like running north at 5 mph south. The limit diverge do it does not exist.
But it is a value. Just one we tend to avoid by claiming it doesn't exist or is impossible... Our minds just have a hard time imagining it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Our minds? Infinity isn't something we don't understand - we invented the concept of infinity. The mathematics community agreed on its definition, which includes the fact that infinity is not a real number, it literally does not exist. Show me infinity, I'll give you infinity+1.
You deciding that infinity means something else is not a math problem but a language problem, so if being right about this is that important to you, start a petition or something
So you believe the universe just ends somewhere with nothing behind it?
What's that got to do with anything? Infinity is just shorthand for "ever-increasing number".
Uhm... No it's not... ๐คจ
First sentence from Wikipedia: "Infinity is something which is boundless, endless, or larger than any natural number."
In other terms give me a natural number n, I'll show you a larger number, n+1, and I'll do it again and again. That's the definition of infinity. There's always a bigger number.
Boundless and endless (and the fact it's larger than any number) doesn't mean it's ever-growing. It already is.
Right! hence why you can only approach it with the limit notation, never operate on it directly. Please, take a calculus class. You might even learn this on day 1
Again, I did... If I could argue all this out of pure imagination, now that would be something...
It is explicitly not a value. The reason you cannot perform arithmetic on infinity is because it has no value. It has cardinality but that is not unique. The set of all integers is infinite as is the set of all real numbers but they have different cardinality as integers are countably infinite whereas real numbers are not countable infinite.
No, it's not a value. It's defined as not being a value. No after how much you bend and break maths, infinity will never be a value. Why do you keep telling people wrong things?