3 ms·
I didn't quite accept that until I challenged a professor in a 300-level university math class. This came up in class, and I spoke up and was like, "no, that ca
by dantillberg 10y ago
I didn't quite accept that until I challenged a professor in a 300-level university math class. This came up in class, and I spoke up and was like, "no, that can't be true, because 0.3333 repeated N times will never equal 1/3."
Up to that point, I had only a fuzzy notion in my mind of what 0.33333... even was or how it was defined. But the professor helped clear this up for me: that "infinitely-repeating decimals" was actually just shorthand for a limit definition, i.e. "0.333..." is defined to be the limit as N approaches infinity of (3/10^1)+(3/10^2)+...+(3/10^N).