Go easy on me.
In: Mathematics
Multiply x by 0: If you have x groups, and each group has zero people, how many people do you have? That question makes sense, because a group can easily have zero people, and you could have zero groups.
Divide x by 0: If you have x items, how many times can you take zero items away from it before you have no items left?
Well, let’s assume that you have ten items.
10 – 0 = 10.
10 – 0 = 10.
10 – 0 = 10.
10 – 0 = 10.
10 – 0 = 10.
And so on and so forth. Note that the question doesn’t have an answer. It doesn’t matter how many times you take zero away from ten, you’ll never hit a point where you have zero items left.
In contrast, what is 12 divided by 3?
12 – 3 = 9
9 – 3 = 6
6 – 3 = 3
3 -3 = 0.
You can remove 3 from 12 four times: 12/3 = 4.
There are more elaborate and less patronizing ways to explain why dividing by zero doesn’t make sense or doesn’t have a clear answer, but that’s the simplest one. You could say “well, why isn’t it infinity?”, and that works as long as you don’t do it with negative numbers. If you try to divide negative numbers by zero you’ll approach negative infinity: so which is it? infinity or negative infinity? Getting two answers with one question isn’t very useful, and so we rather just say it doesn’t have an answer.
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