if numbers are finite, why do we use /100 or 100% to measure limit?

Question

edit: if numbers are *INFINITE*. sorry, my thumb slipped

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

There’s a few ways to look at this.

First is rounding. As in why measure to 1% and not 0.0000001%, or some other figure.
For most applications it just doesn’t matter. The accuracy is irrelevant. Even if you go to two decimal places (in %) that’s going to be enough for most engineering activities. You’d need to get down to really specific things like rocket, plane or maybe massive infrastructure designs where accuracy beyond a few decimal points of a percent actually makes a difference.

The next way to interpret your question is why is percent out of 100, and not some arbitrarly large figure since, as your edit says, numbers are infinite.
We work on a base 10 system. So using percent is easy. Very easy for quick mental maths. Doesn’t matter much to computers I guess, but by the time computers came about I’d guess we were already using percent anyway.