In this example, when you say “divide it zero times”, what you are really saying is “divide it by 2, zero times”.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If I have one whole pizza, and I divide it zero times, then wouldn’t I still have one whole pizza? I.e., shouldn’t 1 / 0 = 1?
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s not what division is though. Division is splitting something into X equal parts. If you split a pizza into 0 equal parts, how large is each part?
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I’m not super great at math, and the concept of division by zero has been somewhat confusing for me. It’s also been a bane to my existence as a programmer. To me, in both scenarios, it makes sense to get back the original number, because 0 equal parts and zero inches wide leaves the original pizza untouched. But I also accept that there are much smarter folks out there who know better than I do, so
undefinedorNaNis what it is.Thanks though for explaining it!
sosodev@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The easiest way to explain divide by zero is to think of division as repeated subtraction. For a simple example of 4 / 2 we know that we would have to subtract 2 from 4 twice to reduce it to 0.
When we divide by zero we’re functionally asking how many times can we remove zero from the numerator until it is reduced to zero. We typically state the answer as infinity or NaN because we know that we could do this operation indefinitely without the numerator reducing to 0.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
To illustrate why it’s not the original number, ask yourself this question — “How many times can you slice a pizza such that each slice is 0 inches wide?”
Yes, you’re leaving the pizza untouched with each slice, so you will never stop slicing.