this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
78 points (91.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
29579 readers
824 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- Posts must be original/unique
- Be good to others - no bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In calculus, things that divide by zero you really learn ״go to infinity” - just graph it and you’ll see! The smaller the denominator gets the larger the result. True, there is no actual value at actual zero. But isn’t sickness limited death? But my crap is still zero because of the numerator.
Thats incorrect too, the real answer is that its undefined. Infinity only is the correct answer if you only examine it from the positive side, so limit of a/x as x goes to 0 is infinity, but if x starts out as negative, the answer would be negative infitnity, causing a logical paradox.
Notice I never said the value IS infinity. I said it “goes to infinity” which is the mathematically correct way to describe what’s going on when considering the limit, at least on the positive side. Of course, because on the negative side of zero, the function goes to negative infinity, it makes the most sense to describe it as undefined, still. 😉
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Hyperbola_one_over_x.svg/800px-Hyperbola_one_over_x.svg.png