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]

• MacGuffin94@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Don’t think of infinity as a value. It’s more of a concept to explain numerical behavior. What you described would be like running north at 5 mph south. The limit diverge do it does not exist.

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  • doctorn@r.nf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    But it is a value. Just one we tend to avoid by claiming it doesn’t exist or is impossible… Our minds just have a hard time imagining it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

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    • 0ops@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Our minds? Infinity isn’t something we don’t understand - we invented the concept of infinity. The mathematics community agreed on its definition, which includes the fact that infinity is not a real number, it literally does not exist. Show me infinity, I’ll give you infinity+1.

      You deciding that infinity means something else is not a math problem but a language problem, so if being right about this is that important to you, start a petition or something

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      • doctorn@r.nf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        So you believe the universe just ends somewhere with nothing behind it?

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    • MacGuffin94@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is explicitly not a value. The reason you cannot perform arithmetic on infinity is because it has no value. It has cardinality but that is not unique. The set of all integers is infinite as is the set of all real numbers but they have different cardinality as integers are countably infinite whereas real numbers are not countable infinite.

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    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No, it’s not a value. It’s defined as not being a value. No after how much you bend and break maths, infinity will never be a value. Why do you keep telling people wrong things?

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• FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If you were to argue this, you’d suddenly break a lot of useful maths. So why would you do so?

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  • doctorn@r.nf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’d only break argumentative math, not actual calculatable math…

    Unlike many always say, math has too many agreements and ‘definitions’ and things we added to be universal. On a universal level infinite solves the +/- by the fact it’s infinite…

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    • 0ops@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It breaks calculus, the math that made your phone and has a billion other uses. Directionality of infinities is critical. In calculus, infinity refers only to the magnitude of the resulting vector. Because I suspect you don’t know, integers are a 1-dimensional vector.

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      • doctorn@r.nf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Nothing in my phone is either infinite, nor negative.

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    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Okay, so what? Breaking useful things is bad, no matter what group they belong to. What is positive about no longer being able to use L’Hopital’s rule?

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    • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Infinite is not calculable math. If you use infinity in your calculations you will get slapped on the wrists by a math professor.

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      • doctorn@r.nf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Google is your friend. I’m gonna leave this here and stop arguing about infinity to people that obviously have no understanding of it.

        Image (quora.com/Is-negative-infinity-equal-to-positive-…)

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