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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2023

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  • If I remember, I’ll give a formal proof when I have time so long as no one else has done so before me. Simply put, we’re not dealing with floats and there’s algorithms to add infinite decimals together from the ones place down using back-propagation. Disproving my statement is as simple as providing a pair of real numbers where doing this is impossible.









  • I can’t help but notice you didn’t answer the question.

    each digit-wise operation must be performed in order

    I’m sure I don’t know what you mean by digit-wise operation, because my conceptuazation of it renders this statement obviously false. For example, we could apply digit-wise modular addition base 10 to any pair of real numbers and the order we choose to perform this operation in won’t matter. I’m pretty sure you’re also not including standard multiplication and addition in your definition of “digit-wise” because we can construct algorithms that address many different orders of digits, meaning this statement would also then be false. In fact, as I lay here having just woken up, I’m having a difficult time figuring out an operation where the order that you address the digits in actually matters.

    Later, you bring up “incrementing” which has no natural definition in a densely populated set. It seems to me that you came up with a function that relies on the notation we’re using (the decimal-increment function, let’s call it) rather than the emergent properties of the objects we’re working with, noticed that the function doesn’t cover the desired domain, and have decided that means the notation is somehow improper. Or maybe you’re saying that the reason it’s improper is because the advanced techniques for interacting with the system are dissimilar from the understanding imparted by the simple techniques.





  • People generally find it odd and unintuitive that it’s possible to use decimal notation to represent 1 as .9~ and so this particular thing will never go away. When I was in HS I wowed some of my teachers by doing proofs on the subject, and every so often I see it online. This will continue to be an interesting fact for as long as decimal is used as a canonical notation.


  • don’t sipport infinite decimals properly

    Please explain this in a way that makes sense to me (I’m an algebraist). I don’t know what it would mean for infinite decimals to be supported “properly” or “improperly”. Furthermore, I’m not aware of any arguments worth taking seriously that don’t use logic, so I’m wondering why that’s a criticism of the notation.