Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
1/3 being equal to .333... Is incredibly basic fractional math.
Think about it this way. What is the value of 1 split into thirds expressed as a decimal?
It can't be .3 because 3 of those is only equal to .9
It also can't be .34 because three of those would be equal to 1.2
This is actually an artifact of using a base 10 number system. For instance if we instead tried representing the fraction 1/3 using base 12 we actually get 1/3=4 (subscript 12 which I can't do on my phone)
Now there are proofs you can find relating to 1/3 being equal to .333... But generally the more simplistic the problem, the more complex the proof is. You might have trouble understand them if you haven't done some advanced work in number theory.
Is there a number system that's not base 10 that would be a "more perfect" representation or that would be better able/more inherently able to capture infinities? Is my question complete nonsense?
Different bases would have different things they cannot represent as a decimal, but no matter what base you can find something that isn't there.
For real world use base 12 is much nicer than base 10. However it isn't perfect. Circles are 360 degrees because base 360 is even nicer yet, but probably too hard to teach multiplication tables.
I get its basic shit that’s over my head. I’m just trying to understands
If the only reason is because 1/3 of 1 = 0.9, than id say the problem is with the question not the answer? Seems like 1 cannot be divided without some magical remainder amount existing
If I have 100 dogs, and I split them into thirds I’ve got 3 lots of 33 dogs and 1 dog left over. So the issue is with my original idea of splitting the dogs into thirds, because clearly I haven’t got 100% in 3 lots because 1 of them is by itself.
Likewise would 0.888… be .9? If we assume that magical remainder number ticks you up the next number wouldn’t that also hold true here as well?
And if 0.8 is the same as 0.888888888…, than why wouldn’t we say 0.7 equals 0.9, etc?
It's over the head of everyone. That's why I shared it here.
No, but 0.899... = 0.9. This only applies to the repeating sequences of the last digit of your base. We're using base 10 so it got to be 9.
Then you split the leftover dog into 10 parts. Why 10? Because you use base 10. Three of those parts go to each lot of dogs... and you still have 1/10 dog left.
Then you do it again. And you have 1/100 dog left. And again, and again, infinitely.
If you take that "infinitely" into account, then you can say that each lot of dogs has exactly one third of the original amount.