Comment on near zero

• marcos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Unknowingly from the GP, that’s where CE got it from.

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  • Gladaed@feddit.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What is gp/ce?

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    • marcos@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Grand parent / computer engineering

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• Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What algebra uses negative 0?

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  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    When taking about limits, you can approach 0 from the positive or negative direction, which can give very different results. For example, lim cotx, x->0+ = ∞ while lim cotx, x->0- = -∞

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    • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Speaking as a mathematician, it’s not really accurate to call that -0.

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      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yes, but it is infinitesimally close.

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      • Gladaed@feddit.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You also can’t call something infinity. People call stuff names. It is just important that they define their terms well enough.

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  • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    IEEE 754

    I mean it’s an algebra, isn’t it? And it definitely was mathematicians who came up with the thing. In the same way that artists didn’t come up with the CGI colour palette.

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    • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m not familiar with IEEE 754.

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      • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It’s a wonderful world where 1 / 0 is ∞ and 1 / -0 is -∞, making a lot of high school teachers very very mad. OTOH it’s also a very strange world where x = y does not imply 1 / x = 1 / y. But it is, very emphatically, an algebra.

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      • Gobbel2000@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        IEEE 754 is the standard to which basically all computer systems implement floating point numbers. It specifically distinguishes between +0 and -0 among other weird quirks.

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      • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        You probably are familiar with the thing, just not under that name, and not as a subject of mathematical study. I am aware that there are, at least in theory, mathematicians never expanding beyond pen+paper (and that’s fine) but TBH they’re getting kinda rare. The last time you fired up Julia you probably used them, R, possibly, Coq, it’d actually be a surprise.

        They’re most widely known to trip up newbie programmers, causing excessive bug hunts and then a proud bug report stating “0.1 + 0.2 /= 0.3, that’s wrong”, to which the reply will be “nope, that’s exactly as the spec says”. The solution, to people who aren’t numerologists, is to sprinkle gratuitous amounts of epsilons everywhere.

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  • Gladaed@feddit.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Math is more than just the set of all algebras.

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    • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m aware. Algebra is what I’m most interested in, and so when someone says “0” I think “additive identity of a ring” unless context makes the use obvious.

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      • barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Depends, I’d say. Is your set theory incomplete or inconsistent?

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