Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 10293
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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 Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 4:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Kytross wrote: | Arithmetic, especially at this early stage, is a language that describes reality. Multiplication is counting how many things you have by how many equal number of groups you have of that thing. Division is counting how many equal groups of items you can make. Either way you are counting something.
If you have two bags with three apples in each bag, then you have six apples.
If you have six apples and divide them evenly into three bags, then you have 2 apples in each bag.
If you have 2 bags with no apples in them, 2 x 0, then you have no apples.
What you can't do is count two apples into no groups, divide by zero. Math is a language that describes reality. If you have two apples, then you have two apples. That's the reality. If you have two apples, then you can't have zero groups of apples. That's either one group of two or two groups of one.
If you want to get rid of the apples, then you're talking about subtraction.
If you want to talk about dividing by zero, you have to leave reality behind.
Luckily for us, math has the capacity for describing the irrational. Irrational math uses the language rules of math to extrapolate things that cannot exist. The classic example is i, the square root of negative one.
Even in describing the irrational, the language rules of math must be adhered to, or you are no longer speaking the language of math. There is no language rule that allows you to describe sorting something into zero groups. |
I like this guy.
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