this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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348
Think about it (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Why is it not 0.125?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

For that to be true it would have to say 0.25 / 2.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

X/0.5 = X*2

Division by less than 1 is essentially multiplying with extra steps

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Huh, thanks for the insight. I've never been able to get my head around weird division like this, and that sounds like a great rule of thumb for thinking about it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Dividing by a fraction is the same as flipping one it on its head and multiplying it.

0.25/0.5 is (1/4)/(1/2)

To multiply it we'd flip one, either works but for this example I decided to flip the second one: (1/4) * (2/1)

The top half of the fractions (numerators) multiply together, then the bottoms (denominators) multiply together. (1*2)/(4*1) = 2/4 which reduces to 1/2

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

same as x * .5 = .25 if that somehow helps ya

I suspect people might be getting confused by this because of colloquialisms like "divided in half", "divided in the middle", "divided by two"

things is, math doesn't care about idioms

another area in mathematics that I've seen ppl (myself included lmao) suffer from this is propositional logic. like with the non exclusive nature of the OR operator

but this is all just a wild guess

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I definitely struggle with any math that I can't visualize in a physical way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Sometimes it clicks if you graph it out with the confusing values on axes.