"math isn't about driving a point home. calculations speak for themselves."

Yeah but they'll look over it if I don't drive it home

"*sigh*. if someone does some math, and comes up with 1 = 2, you can't just say "that's wrong". if its wrong, there's an error in the math, and you'd have to explain what the error is."

Haven't we been through this? The error is simple. .0R1 gets infintely closer to 0, but never hits it. And in the case where 5/0 is undefined, you can't just round it off.

"you can't just think of infinity as a "really big number". you can write a really big number. 100000000000000000 is a really big number, but its not even close to infinity. 10^10000000000000000000000 is even bigger, but not close to infinity either."

I don't think of infinity as that. You do when you think that inf - inf = 0.

"oh dear, there's two of them..."

There's more than that, but what're you scared of? It's just people with a different way of looking at the same thing.

<QUOTE>
Ooooooo did the great Jp make a spelling mistake? He sure did.

"realise"

It's realize. Hehehe, now you have nothing to bitch about.
</QUOTE>

Actually, it is spelt "realise". It's just that you Americans don't speak english. :P

<QUOTE>
oh dear, there's two of them...
</QUOTE>
At least I'm attacking the maths. I allege the 10 X .9R - .9R isn't 9, because 9.9R is 'one nine ahead' of the .9R. You get 8.9R1 (Nine recurring with a 1 at the end), which is consistent with what happens when you multiply, say, .999 by nine.

"Actually, it is spelt "realise". It's just that you Americans don't speak english. :P"

Oh, I forgot it's ok to make spelling mistakes if you're british.

"At least I'm attacking the maths. I allege the 10 X .9R - .9R isn't 9, because 9.9R is 'one nine ahead' of the .9R. You get 8.9R1 (Nine recurring with a 1 at the end), which is consistent with what happens when you multiply, say, .999 by nine."

I agree.

<QUOTE>
"Actually, it is spelt "realise". It's just that you Americans don't speak english. :P"

Oh, I forgot it's ok to make spelling mistakes if you're british.
</QUOTE>

Actually, I'm Australian. And it's you guys making the mistakes. English is the language spoken/written by the english, and that's how the word is spelt. It's just that Americans, for some reason, decided spelling was too hard, and so took all the 'u's out of the words in which they belong. Then they thought they hadn't done enough, so they switched around the letters 'r' and 'e' in a lot of words. Then they decided to change 's'es to 'z's, for some odd reason.

*sings* you say tomato, I say tomawto. You say potato, I saw potawto

By the way, are a lot of people in australia christians? It's really bad over here. Whatever you hear about americans is probably true. We are rather uneducated, unintelligent, highly christian country.

http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/b/ brsp-amsp.html

"In the US many nouns become verbs by adding -ize (standardize). These same words usually end in -ise in Britain, despite the British dictionaries which show -ize as the main form with -ise as an alternative."

So we aren't just changing 's'es to 'z's. In fact the z form is standard and the s one is the alternate in British English. We just got rid of an alternate spelling.

And in many cases as noted by the link the changes were made so that a spelling is done closer to how a word sounds which makes sense as our alphabet is a phonetic one.

Ok i'm not that far in math. I'm only in my first year of calculus, and only 4th chapter at that.

If you plan to continue your pain has only started :). Only goes downhill from Calculus.

There's more than that, but what're you scared of? It's just people with a different way of looking at the same thing.

its not open to interpretation. we're not reading a book and discussing what we think it means. when you have to figure out what 3+4 is, it doesn't matter how you feel about it, its 7. if you don't understand addition, that doesn't make it wrong, and it doesn't make people that know it and use it morons.

and, instead of rehashing that entire blog-whoring thread, http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.0.9999.html

actually, the interpretation part is where .9999R either is rounded to 1 or .999999999999R. Rounding and the number of decimals is open.

Furthermore, why is it mathematically undefined? This is just an arbitrary rule, not some absolute law of the fabric of reality... Early mathematicians decided to say "you can't divide a number by zero"... And that's that...

But why was this decided?

Simple, it's because (normal) math isn't capable of handling infinity... So any operation that would wind up at infinity must be outlawed...

n/0 is labeled as "undefined" because it equals infinity...