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.
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.
