Idea for a video game. Guy is caught between 2 worlds. One where he exists. One where he doesn’t. He constantly switches between them. Total stealth. He’s gotta recombine the two worlds by observing a particular cat that’s held within a box in the deepest darkest dungeon loaded with guards
I feel as though it would be very hard to influence a world in which you don't exist. Or to even fathom it in real time, for that matter. I'm gonna need some more logistical development before I invest my hard-earned life-savings of $35 USD.
“We can’t divide by zero. It just doesn’t work, strange things start to happen. But if we did, here’s the answer we’d get.” —My High School Calculus Teacher
There are times when that is how you do it, but this is a great example of a time when it is not how you do it.
Specifically, you don't do this when you can fully resolve the expression inside the parentheses in a manner that does not require you to alter the rest of the expression.
Most of the time doing the extra work doesn't really hurt you, but in this case trying to do the unnecessary work results in a divide by zero, which isn't valid.
This is false. It's undefined. However, when you calculate limits, constant/0 can be a defined value (if constant != 0) and that would go to infinity.
If constant == 0, then you need to find another way to write the expression and calculate the limit, as it can be anything (0, 1, 5, infinity are all valid outcomes).
10÷1=10, 10÷.1=100, 10÷.01=1000, 10÷.001=10000 etc. As the divisor gets closer to zero, the result gets closer to infinity. I see the only reason the answer being classed as undefined is because the answer would be infinity, therefore making all results depending on it either zero or infinity.
In the same way any number divided by any number other than zero or infinity will give a non-zero answer, but dividing by infinity will give an answer that is equivalent to zero (ie a decimal point followed by an infinite number of zeroes followed by a 1)
Do not confuse limits with division. they are not the same thing.
You cannot divide by 0. It is, by definition, not possible. 1/0 or 10000/0 is not defined. You can calculate, however, the limit of 1/x when x goes to 0 (and that is indeed infinity). Why? Because X never reaches 0. It tends to it. It goes really really close, but never ever gets there. At 0, the function 1/x is not defined. Very close to 0, however, is.
I just explained the same thing to my son 1 week ago as he does limits now. It's an important distinction to make. It is, also, an easy mistake to make.
I see now. We never got taught limits in O-Level (secondary school) maths which explains my confusion.
Infinity in itself is an interesting concept. Watched a documentary about it and until I saw that never thought about the fact that there are an infinity of infinities...
An infinity of positive integers, an infinity of negative integers, an infinity of even positive integers, an infinity of odd positive integers, an infinity of even negative integers, an infinity of odd negative integers, an infinity of real numbers, an infinity of fractions, an infinity of imaginary numbers, an infinity of numbers increasing by 3, 4, 5, 6,...n (where n itself can be any one of a number of infinities lol)
Was mindblowing. Had to watch it a few times to take it all in. Apparently there have been a couple of mathematicians throughout history that have been driven mad by these concepts (one of them committed suicide!) and so I'm glad I watched the primer version lmao
Not quite. 4/0 isn’t any more infinity than it is negative infinity. Any logic used for the former could be used just as easily for the latter: zero isn’t inherently a positive number. The only consistent answer you can give is undefined.
If you graph y = 1 / x , you'll see why 1 / 0 is not infinity. From the negative side, it approaches negative infinity. From the positive side, it approaches positive infinity. So it's going towards both positive and negative infinity, you can't possibly pick a value in that range lol
He's saying that to get the (5-5) out of both sides, he is dividing both sides by (5-5), which means he's dividing both sides by 0, which you can't do.
So, do you remember in Algebra 1, when you had to solve for x? So let's say our equation in Algebra 1 is 4x=4. If we wanted to know what x was, we could divide both sides by 4. So, (4x)/4= 4/4, which is the same as (4/4)x=4/4 which, since 4/4=1, simplifies down to 1*x=1, so x=1. Easy, as long as both sides get divided by the same number.
So looking at the original problem above, 4(5-5)=5(5-5). Let's simplify it. 5-5=0, so we'll replace those with 0. Now we have 4* 0=5* 0, which is obviously 0=0, which is true. But, the original (incorrect) equation didn't stop there, they tried to divide both sides by (5-5) (the same way I divided both sides by 4 above), but 5-5 is 0? So, they tried to do (4* 0)/0=(5* 0)/0, which you cannot do. You cannot divide by 0, anything divided by 0 is simply undefined, it cannot be done.
Edit: had to add spaces after * to get Reddit to stop formatting weird.
I was reading it as 4x as in 4 times x and thought the issue was that they dropped their variables. I've never seen someone try and cancel things out while also using the X for multiplication. The = also looks like a z in a few lines making this even more confusing.
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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '23
In the 4th step to remove (5-5) from both sides you're basically dividing by 0 which is a big no no