A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are led into a long room. At the other end stands a beautiful naked woman. "When I ring this bell," she says" you may cross half the space between us. When I ring the bell again, you may again cross half the space between us." Both the mathematician and physicist groan and wander off. "Ah, it's Zeno's paradox, we can never actually reach her." The engineer, waiting for the bell, says "I think I can get close enough."
why is there a naked woman?
Because humanity has no other desires between math and tits apparently.
Can confirm.
(I'm both a mathematician and a pervert)
Also mathematicians: here's this cool new thing, I called it "infinitesimal"
In computer engineering we have positive and negative zero.
Also in Math.
What algebra uses negative 0?
When taking about limits, you can approach 0 from the positive or negative direction, which can give very different results. For example, lim cotx, x->0+ = ∞ while lim cotx, x->0- = -∞
Speaking as a mathematician, it's not really accurate to call that -0.
Yes, but it is infinitesimally close.
IEEE 754
I mean it's an algebra, isn't it? And it definitely was mathematicians who came up with the thing. In the same way that artists didn't come up with the CGI colour palette.
What do you mean? In two's complement, there is only one zero.
IEEE 754 floating point numbers have a signed bit at the front, causing +0 and -0 to exist.
Specifically I was referring to standard float representation which permits signed zeros. However, other comments provide some interesting examples also.
floats
And, as a mathematician who has been coding a library to create scaled geometric graphics for his paper, I hate -0.0.
Seriously, I run every number where sign determines action through a function I call "fix_zero" just because tiny tiny rounding errors pile up in floats, even is numpy.
Limit x->0 { x } = 0 ? Noway
Wait do you actually say "limit" instead of "limes" in English?
Yeah, I was gonna say... Calculus is all about saying it's infinitely approaching zero so let's assume it is zero.
i mean, mathematically speaking, every number that isn't zero, is further away from zero, than the number before it.
So there is a point to the statement of "approaching zero" as well "near zero" and "about zero" since 100 probably isn't about zero.
Also CS nerds would like to fight you about floating point values.
Whoa slow down there buddy. Proposing numbers before numbers like they are a given.
sin(x) ~= 0
cosmologists: sin(x) ~= 10
"small but non-zero" is one of my favorite phrases 😅
I like Paul Erdős's usage of "epsilon" to refer to children
The infinitesimal has entered the chat.
lets ignore the higher order terms for now. five lines below look at this beautiful exact equality that we got
What about large values of zero?