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BBC reports professor can divide by 0

The reader comments are highly amusing though.

Frankly, this is just a reflection of the increasingly shoddy journalism that makes up the BBC website.
 
tkingdoll said:
The reader comments are highly amusing though.

Frankly, this is just a reflection of the increasingly shoddy journalism that makes up the BBC website.
Click to expand...

What kind of slow news days do you have over there? Isn't there a royal acting like a twit or something?


P.S. I should not have compared royals to twits, and I should apologize. Twits, I'm sorry.
 
Umm, does this high school teacher realize he's being redundant? Null is nothing, 0 is nothing. He just decided to call 0 "nullity" rather than 0 or error.

I think this guy is giving those children a poor education. This teacher should be in a college philosophy department, not teaching young children. :)
 
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If you end up dividing by zero, that usually means that something else went wrong somewhere else. So this inane "nullity" wouldn't do anything but mask the problem.

And if my pacemaker was dividing time/beats to get seconds per beat and the number of beats was zero, I think I have bigger problems than the mathematical fact that you can't divide by zero.
 
The theory of nullity is set to make all kinds of sums possible that, previously, scientists and computers couldn't work around.
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I was never much of a programer. But I found that something like:

"If X = 0 then gosub nonzero"

Usualy worked around such problems. I guess I must have been wrong. I wonder how the BBC reporter plans to teach computers the new number.
 
Solus said:
Umm, does this high school teacher realize he's being redundant? Null is nothing, 0 is nothing. He just decided to call 0 "nullity" rather than 0.

I think this guy is giving those children a poor education. This teacher should be in a college philosophy department, not teaching young children. :)
Click to expand...

Null does not equal 0.

Null is the absence of a value.

0 is a value.
 
tkingdoll said:
The reader comments are highly amusing though.

Frankly, this is just a reflection of the increasingly shoddy journalism that makes up the BBC website.
Click to expand...

Oh god, I didn't see the comments. The sadness factor just doubled. People are saying things like "zero is just really small, so we should define it to actually be nothing, zero, nada, zilch." (paraphrased)
 
Ooooh, I found a real gem.

Remember that for a long time everyone thought 1/0 was impossible to define, but now it is accepted that 1/0 = infinity. This new concept is really not much of a stretch beyond that.
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It's sad on multiple levels!
 
Did you see his other work?

Perspex machine: VII. The universal perspex machine James A. D. W. Anderson The Univ. of Reading (United Kingdom) (published online Jan. 15, 2006) The perspex machine arose from the unification of projective geometry with the Turing machine. It uses a total arithmetic, called transreal arithmetic, that contains real arithmetic and allows division by zero. Transreal arithmetic is redefined here...
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Transreal arithmetic?

Loose Change should contact this guy. I'm sure he can come up with some fantastic mathematical "theorems" to prove whatever they want to prove.
 
Spindrift said:
Null does not equal 0.

Null is the absence of a value.

0 is a value.
Click to expand...

Thanks for letting me know. Math has always been my weakest area. Now history on the otherhand...

Yes, that's true 0 has a value: 0. But in the vernacular 0 commonly means nothing, or null. That's where my statement comes from.
 
Alkatran said:
Oh god, I didn't see the comments. The sadness factor just doubled. People are saying things like "zero is just really small, so we should define it to actually be nothing, zero, nada, zilch." (paraphrased)
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And the less sophisticated "dude, we're all in the Matrix, whoa! you're like, Neo, lololololo111!!!!1111!1"
 
lol divide by zero

its a running joke on 4chan


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Spindrift said:
Did you see his other work?

Transreal arithmetic?

Loose Change should contact this guy. I'm sure he can come up with some fantastic mathematical "theorems" to prove whatever they want to prove.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the Turing machine quote confused me as well. If he somehow conceived of a machine which was "more powerful" than a Turing machine (can compute more things) then there are a lot of computational theorists that want to have a little talk.
 
Doubt said:
I was never much of a programer. But I found that something like:

"If X = 0 then gosub nonzero"

Usualy worked around such problems. I guess I must have been wrong. I wonder how the BBC reporter plans to teach computers the new number.
Click to expand...
Yeah--where the subroutine prints an eror message, and exits the program.
Dividing by zero usually means either 1) you messed up the calculations, or 2) you screwed up the valid domain
 
This reminds me of the very silly media interest back in 1999 of some 12-year old kid in New Zealand or some other far-flung place who was touted as having solved the Y2K problem. It was unbelievable that whatever news organization fell for it didn't get the basic fact that the problem was well understood and the solution was simply hard-slogging through old code, which was well underway.

Same goes for the divide by zero problem. If your software crashes on that, then you've got to build in a little bit better error capture.
 
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