near zero
near zero
107 comments
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Also mathematicians: here's this cool new thing, I called it "infinitesimal"
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In computer engineering we have positive and negative zero.
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And, as a mathematician who has been coding a library to create scaled geometric graphics for his paper, I hate -0.0.
Seriously, I run every number where sign determines action through a function I call "fix_zero" just because tiny tiny rounding errors pile up in floats, even is numpy.
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What do you mean? In two's complement, there is only one zero.
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Limit x->0 { x } = 0 ? Noway
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Wait do you actually say "limit" instead of "limes" in English?
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Yes, as in "Why can't I hold all these limits?"
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I usually uses lim
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Yes.
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Yeah, I was gonna say... Calculus is all about saying it's infinitely approaching zero so let's assume it is zero.
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sin(x) ~= 0-
cosmologists: sin(x) ~= 10
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i mean, mathematically speaking, every number that isn't zero, is further away from zero, than the number before it.
So there is a point to the statement of "approaching zero" as well "near zero" and "about zero" since 100 probably isn't about zero.
Also CS nerds would like to fight you about floating point values.
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"small but non-zero" is one of my favorite phrases 😅
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I like Paul Erdős's usage of "epsilon" to refer to children
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lets ignore the higher order terms for now. five lines below look at this beautiful exact equality that we got
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What about large values of zero?
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Trivial
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~ ∞
107 comments
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are led into a long room. At the other end stands a beautiful naked woman. "When I ring this bell," she says" you may cross half the space between us. When I ring the bell again, you may again cross half the space between us." Both the mathematician and physicist groan and wander off. "Ah, it's Zeno's paradox, we can never actually reach her." The engineer, waiting for the bell, says "I think I can get close enough."
why is there a naked woman?
For the joke to work.
Because humanity has no other desires between math and tits apparently.
Sexism, obvs
Only straight men are mathematicians, physicists and engineers. This is why the joke is framed this way.
See: responses from OP, valiantly defending his choice to "piss people off", instead of noticing the joke is just yet another reminder that men are default.
After all, sexism is over, and STEM isn't hostile to women/non-heteronormative people. It's all in our head.