this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Anything /0 is considered impossible as an agreement. There's no actual math involved in that answer. In reality you can divide by 0, but the answer has no natural number.
How many times can you add 0 before you get 1? The answer actually is the drunk(๐ ) 8 or 'infinite', but our minds can't grasp the very existence of infinite, so we just went with 'impossible'.
There are ways to circumvent that added concept of some calculators when dividing by 0 anyway and it will show you "Infinite" if it is able to. I remember you could do this in C+ even, but not 100% sure anymore how. I think it was with dividing by an ever decreasing number-variable. When it reaches 0 just before the calculation, C+ didn't default to an error, but just said 'Infinite'. But like I said, not 100% sure anymore if that was the actual way.
If your counter against that is that 0 will never become 1 no matter how many you add, then that just proves 'infinite' correct. If it ever could, it wouldn't be infinite...
Sooo, this guy is smart, but also wrong in his calculation here. ๐
Edit: Anyway, voting me down doesn't change the inconvenient truth above. ๐
I was always taught it was infinity as opposed to impossible.
Division is defined as the inverse of multiplication. The answer to one divided by zero is the same as asking which number you would multiply by zero in order to get one. No number has that property, not even infinity. So the answer is undefined.
One divided by 'epsilon', where epsilon represents a very tiny number, approaches infinity for ever tinier epsilons, so in some maths contexts infinity makes sense. But in general it's a meaningless question, and so can only have a meaningless answer.