[afransen TO]

Article/Video

This guy is such a huge hack. He just made a definition for a useless concept and said some awful things about airplanes and pacemakers dividing by zero and killing hoards of people...

 

[bizorky]

I had a philosophy professor in university who would have had a good laugh at this.

Someone should tell the teacher at hand that infinity is not a number - and that there are more than two infinities.


mathworld.wolfram.com/WholeNumber.html

 

[Degnaw]

ahahahha, this is so ridiculous it's not even funny. So now the law that anything times 0 = 0 is negated? And now I0 x 0 = any number you want? riiiiiiight....

 

[afransen TO]

I read his research paper. He defines a new number system which is transreals: R U {-Inf,+Inf,Phi} where Phi is 'nullity' (0/0). He wrote up a bunch of axioms. It works, but unfortunately it's not very useful. I saw a very sound rebuttal. One way in which this system is clearly not very useful is:

Reals:

For all a,b,c in R

ac = bc ==> a=b

In the transreals:

For all a,b,c in transreals,

ac = bc AND c!= Phi AND c!= +- Inf ==> a=b

So in order to do something as basic as the cancellation of a common divisor requires checking four times as many conditions.

Here is the rebuttal I was referring to: link

He refers to some fairly high level mathematics but I think a layperson could get the gist of most of it.

 

[EnviroTO]

How dumb. Give a name to "undefined" and somehow that fixes computers and math? How dumb can you get? Call it "undefined" or "nullity" and you still have the same issue... dividing by zero creates something which is not a number. I can't believe this guy is teaching this. I'm going to rename "two" to "gubo" because it solves the issue of people confusing "one two three" from 123 versus 1 to 3 and teach this wacked system to students.

 

[afransen TO]

Well, it works, it's just not terribly useful.

The unfortunate part is that he's teaching school children. He is doing them a grave disservice and setting them up for trouble in calculus.

 

[bizorky]

^Fortunately the children will probably forget all this.