pokoko on 02 April 2016
| Faelco said: Its even funnier to read these (I love the last one :D ) |
From the same article:
Although the real numbers form an extremely useful number system, the decision to interpret the notation "0.999…" as naming a real number is ultimately a convention, and Timothy Gowers argues in Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction that the resulting identity 0.999… = 1 is a convention as well:
However, it is by no means an arbitrary convention, because not adopting it forces one either to invent strange new objects or to abandon some of the familiar rules of arithmetic.[47]
A convention is the perfect word for it. Plenty of examples are given where this is not accepted across all math systems. That "lower primate" quote seems extremely narrow minded.
