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General - MATH HELP - View Post

Farmageddon said:


Well, The idea of negative infinity equaling to zero there is the same as the idea of n/0 equaling infinity, and most math teachers are pretty adamant in saying you can never, ever, for your life, divde by zero :P

A preamble:

I agree that if Soriku hasn't even reached limits in his studies, the context is probably that of real numbers - thus the correct answer is "there's no solution of the equation in the real number set".

A digression:

that said, you're not correct in the first part of your statement. If you extend real numbers to hyperreal numbers you have a rigorous and coherent way to treat infinite and infinitesimal numbers.

In R* (the hyperreal set) if dx is an infinitesimal, for example, 12/0 keeps having no meaning but 12/dx has (it's an infinte quantity, of course, and thus you can't take its standard real part).

Thus in such context division by zero keeps having no defined meaning, but you can formulate in a "static" way some expressions that require limits in standard analysis and calculus, such as Soriku's equation.

 



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