Attention: Please take a moment to consider our terms and conditions before posting.

If 1/3 x 3 = 1....

2»

Comments

  • I've just read through the Henry Irving and Airman Brown tit for tat, and then read through this.

    I now feel remarkably stupid.

    Thanks Charlton Life.
  • PL54 said:

    Obviously infinity is never reached

    Absolute zero doesn't exist either, just approximations to it which are called 0

    Infinity isn't a number and absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature, nothing to do at maths and it does exist.
    Really sorry - was going back to A level Maths, Physics and Chemistry and might have merged some bits and am clearly better off for not continuing down that route

    I used the term absolute zero meaning that there is not actually a zero, just things quite close to nothing.

    It means numbers are all an approximation; 6 minus 6 doesn't equal nothing.

    Cheese.
  • lolwray said:

    my anoraks in the dry cleaners at the moment ...............

    That must explain the missed apostrophe
  • Fiiish said:

    It is purely an idiosyncrasy of the decimal or base 10 system we use. 0.333... is simply a decimal representation of the expression "a third of one whole" and is meaningless without understanding that this is what it means.

    If we use Base 12, then 0.333... is expressed simply as 0.4, therefore 0.4*2 is 0.8 and 0.4*3 is 1.

    We likely use Base 10 as standard because we have 10 digits across both hands, so if we were born with 5 fingers and 1 thumb (or if Norfolk was the birthplace of mathematics) then we would probably be using Base 12 as standard and we would not have this conundrum (although there would likely be a similar conundrum if we used Base 12 instead).

    Hey...!!!!

    *flips Fiiish off with both middle fingers - on both hands"
Sign In or Register to comment.

Roland Out Forever!