4 ms·
Sounds legit, infinity is singular and so is 0. I think one problem is also that division isn't the only mathematical operation which can produce dubious result
by blablabla123 2y ago
Sounds legit, infinity is singular and so is 0. I think one problem is also that division isn't the only mathematical operation which can produce dubious results. E.g. sqrt(x), arctan(x) which have multiple branches which is why there is often a separate arctan2(x, y) to select the correct branch. Oh well and then there's just addition which silently overflows in almost every programming language.
Without arbitrary precision numerics and functions which aren't explicit about corner cases it's always a simplification. However performance-/code-wise this is usually not feasible.
- eru 2y agoWhy is infinity singular? There's at least positive and negative infinity. And why do you bring up infinity? In regular math, 1/0 is literally undefined. It's not infinity.
- DarkNova6 2y agoHilbert's Hotel shows nicely that infinity can't be singular.
- blablabla123 2y agoYeah but this is basically about countable and uncountable sets. It's rather counter-intuitive that the rational numbers are countable. So it's possible to create even a bijective mapping between rational numbers and natural numbers. On the other hand real numbers (which number types in programming languages try to approximate) are uncountable
- knappa 2y agoPretty sure this person meant singular as in singularity, not singular as in one.