Reinventing the square wheel
December 8th, 2006
There’s an almighty fuss going on across the world’s science blogs in response to a BBC report that one Dr James Anderson has discovered a way to divide by zero. He achieved this by inventing a new number, nullity. What is nullity equal to? Well, everything! From -infinity to infinity. How useful is this? Not at all! Is this even a new idea? No!
I’d comment further but there are far more elegant debunkings going on here and here.
Entry Filed under: General
|
|
|
|
1 Comment Add your own
1. C3P0 | December 8th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Well spotted Frank. If a computer can’t divide by zero, I don’t think it’s going to find it any easier to deal with the concept of ‘nullity’. I wonder why he’s teaching this to school kids and not maths graduates?
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed