What’s stopping mathematicians from defining a number for 1 ÷ 0, like what they did with √-1?

Question

What’s stopping mathematicians from defining a number for 1 ÷ 0, like what they did with √-1?

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

First, there is only kind of a definition for √-1. It’s not actually solvable to anything. Like √2 can be represented as a decimal but √-1 just gets called i to allow to solve other √-x.

The second is because there isn’t a way to represent dividing by zero. It also doesn’t need to exist to solve any kind of problem. Think of buckets. If I have 10 apples and 5 buckets I can put 2 apples in each bucket. But it i have no buckets, there is no answer that resolves how many apples are in each bucket. There are no buckets.