Skip Navigation
I just cited myself.
  • fair enough, but i think the confusion for that commenter comes from a misunderstanding of the definition of the mathematical concept rather than the meaning of the English word. they just think irrational numbers are those that have infinite decimal digits, which is not the definition.

  • I just cited myself.
  • not really. i get it because we use rational to mean logical, but that's not what it means here. yeah, real and normal are stupid names but rational numbers are numbers that can be represented as a ratio of two numbers. i think it's pretty good.

  • I just cited myself.
  • you're thinking about this backwards: the decimal notation isn't something that's natural, it's just a way to represent numbers that we invented. 0.333... = 1/3 because that's the way we decided to represent 1/3 in decimals. the problem here isn't that 1 cannot be divided by 3 at all, it's that 10 cannot be divided by 3 and give a whole number. and because we use the decimal system, we have to notate it using infinite repeating numbers but that doesn't change the value of 1/3 or 10/3.

    different bases don't change the values either. 12 can be divided by 3 and give a whole number, so we don't need infinite digits. but both 0.333... in decimal and 0.4 in base12 are still 1/3.

    there's no need to change the base. we know a third of one is a third and three thirds is one. how you notate it doesn't change this at all.

  • I just cited myself.
  • i don't think any number system can be safe from infinite digits. there's bound to be some number for each one that has to be represented with them. it's not intuitive, but that's because infinity isn't intuitive. that doesn't mean there's a problem there though. also the arguments are so simple i don't understand why anyone would insist that there has to be a difference.

    for me the simplest is:

    1/3 = 0.333...

    so

    3×0.333... = 3×1/3

    0.999... = 3/3

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PY
    pyre @lemmy.world
    Posts 0
    Comments 502