Divide By Zero

This bbc article is about a teacher who claims to have solved the divide by 0 problem, i.e. that it’s impossible to divide by zero.  There is no number.. it’s somewhere between -infinity and +infinity. in other words, it’s all number at once..

He hasn’t in fact, he has just proven that this maths is impossible.  All he has done, is call 0/0 something “nullity”.  It’s totally useless.  He claims that a plane will crash if it divides by zero, and everything computer driven will break when attempting to divide by zero.

Right, but also WRONG!  Computers rightly throw errors when this happens (calculators too), but correctly handling that error is what’s important, planes will show this error and act accordingly.  The point is that no maths works after this point, because the number is mathematically impossible, if you watch the video he even shows this, by drawing it off the number scale, which shows it’s completely un-workable from that point on.  All his maths do is get to the unworkable part, which we can and always have been able to do..

Theres a comment on the site by a guy named bob which sums this up quite well:

The problem with this “new number” that “[stretches] from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity,” that will supposedly allow computers to grasp x/0, is that ANY equation can equal nullity. 1+1=nullity, 3*-3=nullity, etc. So unless you hard-code every programing language to only use this number in the event of dividing by zero, it will cause errors in any math problem. And then, say you have a flight computer, as the above article suggests, that needs to divide by zero, and then add 100, and that’s how many yards it has left till it hits the ground. x/0+100=nullity, so it has anywhere between infinity and negative infinity until it crashes. That really narrows it down, huh? Now instead of the program getting syntax error, which will quit out of the program with an error message, the program gets a logical error, as it will attempt to manipulate a totally worthless number. What will the program assume? It’s infinite miles away from the earth? It’s infinite miles under the surface? Somewhere in between? The program wont crash, but the plane sure as hell will.