Science Memes

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[+] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de -9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

You're just rounding up an irrational number. You have a non terminating, non repeating number, that will go on forever, because it can never actually get up to its whole value.

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[–] WldFyre@lemm.ee 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

1/3 is a rational number, because it can be depicted by a ratio of two integers. You clearly don't know what you're talking about, you're getting basic algebra level facts wrong. Maybe take a hint and read some real math instead of relying on your bad intuition.

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[+] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de -12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

1/3 is rational.

.3333....... is not. You can't treat fractions the same as our base 10 number system. They don't all have direct conversions. Hence, why you can have a perfect fraction of a third, but not a perfect 1/3 written out in base 10.

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[–] WldFyre@lemm.ee 15 points 2 years ago

0.333... exactly equals 1/3 in base 10. What you are saying is factually incorrect and literally nonsense. You learn this in high school level math classes. Link literally any source that supports your position.

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

.333... is rational.

at least we finally found your problem: you don't know what rational and irrational mean. the clue is in the name.

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[–] Klear@sh.itjust.works 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

TBH the name is a bit misleading. Same for "real" numbers. And oh so much more so for "normal numbers".

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

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.

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[–] Klear@sh.itjust.works 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

I know all of that, but it's still misleading. It's not a dumb name by any means, but it still causes confusion often (as evidenced by many comments here)

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

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.

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

non repeating

it's literally repeating

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[+] ArchAengelus@lemmy.dbzer0.com -21 points 2 years ago (2 children)

In this context, yes, because of the cancellation on the fractions when you recover.

1/3 x 3 = 1

I would say without the context, there is an infinitesimal difference. The approximation solution above essentially ignores the problem which is more of a functional flaw in base 10 than a real number theory issue

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[–] Shampiss@sh.itjust.works 25 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

The context doesn't make a difference

In base 10 --> 1/3 is 0.333...

In base 12 --> 1/3 is 0.4

But they're both the same number.

Base 10 simply is not capable of displaying it in a concise format. We could say that this is a notation issue. No notation is perfect. Base 10 has some confusing implications

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[+] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de -9 points 2 years ago

They're different numbers. Base 10 isn't perfect and can't do everything just right, so you end up with irrational numbers that go on forever, sometimes.

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[–] chaonaut@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago

This seems to be conflating 0.333...3 with 0.333... One is infinitesimally close to 1/3, the other is a decimal representation of 1/3. Indeed, if 1-0.999... resulted in anything other than 0, that would necessarily be a number with more significant digits than 0.999... which would mean that the ... failed to be an infinite repetition.