Comment on (I wonder if he knows about lemmy)1 divided by 0 (a 3rd grade teacher and principal got it wrong), Reddit r/NoStupidQuestions [4:51 | Dec 02 2023 | bprp precalculus]

doctorn@r.nf ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Anything /0 is considered impossible as an agreement. There’s no actual math involved in that answer. In reality you can divide by 0, but the answer has no natural number.

How many times can you add 0 before you get 1? The answer actually is the drunk(😅) 8 or ‘infinite’, but our minds can’t grasp the very existence of infinite, so we just went with ‘impossible’.

There are ways to circumvent that added concept of some calculators when dividing by 0 anyway and it will show you “Infinite” if it is able to. I remember you could do this in C+ even, but not 100% sure anymore how. I think it was with dividing by an ever decreasing number-variable. When it reaches 0 just before the calculation, C+ didn’t default to an error, but just said ‘Infinite’. But like I said, not 100% sure anymore if that was the actual way.

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