this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
348 points (86.6% liked)
memes
10428 readers
3326 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why is it not 0.125?
For that to be true it would have to say 0.25 / 2.
X/0.5 = X*2
Division by less than 1 is essentially multiplying with extra steps
Huh, thanks for the insight. I've never been able to get my head around weird division like this, and that sounds like a great rule of thumb for thinking about it.
Dividing by a fraction is the same as flipping one it on its head and multiplying it.
0.25/0.5 is (1/4)/(1/2)
To multiply it we'd flip one, either works but for this example I decided to flip the second one: (1/4) * (2/1)
The top half of the fractions (numerators) multiply together, then the bottoms (denominators) multiply together. (1*2)/(4*1) = 2/4 which reduces to 1/2
I learned this one weird trick (maffemetishuns hate him!!!) a few years back when I went back to education and honestly it revolutionised how I looked at fraction division.
same as
x * .5 = .25if that somehow helps yaI suspect people might be getting confused by this because of colloquialisms like "divided in half", "divided in the middle", "divided by two"
things is, math doesn't care about idioms
another area in mathematics that I've seen ppl (myself included lmao) suffer from this is propositional logic. like with the non exclusive nature of the OR operator
but this is all just a wild guess
I definitely struggle with any math that I can't visualize in a physical way.
Sometimes it clicks if you graph it out with the confusing values on axes.