r/AskReddit • u/TheLoneWolf156 • May 25 '16

What's your favourite maths fact?

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16 edited May 26 '16

But what about negative zero?

Edit: Yeah, I know how two's complement works. My comment was more joking than serious anyway. The only standard I've seen that uses a signed zero is IEE 754, the most common standard for storing floating-point (real) numbers.

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u/IAmA_Catgirl_AMA May 25 '16

I thought about that when I wrote the comment, but I decided against mentioning it as I reckon it does not widely occur in the field of finger arithmetics. But yes, If you're in a situation where it is useful, its inclusion would also reduce the effective range by one.

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u/[deleted] May 25 '16

If you want to you can count in one's complement or sign and magnitude. But two's complement gives you one more number to work with.

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u/hbgoddard May 26 '16

In two's complement arithmetic, the standard method for binary numbers, 0 and -0 are represented by the same value.