this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 35 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I have a strong relationship to what you get when you divide by zero.

Good ol' NaN

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 6 points 17 hours ago

I like writing swear words into the mantissa of NaN numbers

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 23 hours ago

You only get NaN for division by zero if you divide 0 by 0 in IEEE floating point. For X/0 with X ≠ 0, you get sign(X)•Inf.

And for real numbers, X/0 has to be left undefined (for all real X) or else the remaining field axioms would allow you to derive yourself into contradictions. (And this extends to complex numbers too.)