Saturday, December 30, 2006

Nullity

A rather amusing article from the BBC about a man who claims to have answered the question of what 0/0 is, by giving it the name "nullity".

Now there are several problems to his claiming that this is a revolutionary development. The first, and most important, is that IEEE 754 came up with essentially the same answer about forever ago, only they called it NaN, not a number. So not original.

The second problem is that pretending that 0/0 is the same as anything else is, well, wrong. I'm pretty sure if you gave me ten minutes I could prove that 0 = 1, given his definitions. But I don't want to waste the brain time.

Bad BBC. Bad teacher.

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