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Somewhere in the distant past a second grade me is staring at his math homework and fuming over the frustratingly ambiguous meaning of the minus sign. Is it an
by ChainOfFools 3y ago
Somewhere in the distant past a second grade me is staring at his math homework and fuming over the frustratingly ambiguous meaning of the minus sign. Is it an operator? A property? Both?
- Dylan16807 3y agoIt's only ambiguous if you think it does two things. I say it does one thing. -4 always removes 4, whether or not there is a number to the left.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoThe problem arises with the way that this stuff is taught at a very elementary level, which then needs to be thrown away and relearned long after intuition and habits have formed around the old model. As an adult my reasoning is that it does indeed only do one thing: negation. it doesn't take anything away at all, if anything it actually adds information. Negating a four doesn't take it away, it just specifies a different (inverted) mapping of a given value with respect to zero. And this is still a very naive take, as someone with no background in number theory. But it's much more useful than say, Billy has four apples, he gives three to Mary, etc.
- thr-nrg 3y agoMath notation is to mathematics as poetry is to English. The only acceptable grammar for math is s-expressions.
- Qem 3y agoWe could make the minus sign go away if we adopted a balanced base (e.g. balanced ternary), that has both negative and positive digits. That way, just looking at the digits would make evident if a number is positive or negative, without any need for a minus sign.
- RhysU 3y agoI love that such systems were built once: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun