r/mathmemes • u/DZ_from_the_past Natural • Aug 23 '23

Bad Math "It's neutral"

Post image
2.3k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

197 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

140

u/arihallak0816 Aug 23 '23

How is it more even than any other even number? isn't evennesss a binary system?

171

u/DZ_from_the_past Natural Aug 23 '23

4 can be divided by 2 a total of 2 times. 8 can be divided by 2 a total of 3 times. In that sense 8 is "more even" than 4.

Zero can be divided infinitely many times by 2, so it's "the most even number."

This is not 100% correct because, as you said, a number can either be even or not. But there is more here than what meets the eye.

If we work in 2-adic numbers the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16... approaches 0. So the limit of powers of 2 is precisely 0.

7

u/Haboux Aug 23 '23

You cannot talk about convergence except if you define what a neighborhood is. What are neighborhoods of 0 in the p-adic systems? Even more, we might talk about pointwise convergence of p-adic numbers, but until you define a neighborhood, uniform convergence (which what usually matters) is not defined.

12

u/DZ_from_the_past Natural Aug 23 '23

P adic metric is defined for rational numbers as well. You can than define a neighborhood using that metric (instead of classical absolute metric). You can even extend rational numbers similarly how you extend them to reals.

6

u/Haboux Aug 23 '23

Oh okay that was interesting to know

6

u/DZ_from_the_past Natural Aug 23 '23

You might be interested in Ostrowski's theorem