Why can’t 0 be divided by 0?

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This applies to any numbers being divided by 0 really. In all honesty, wouldn’t 0 divided by anything just be 0? There was nothing there to divide in the first place, so why expect there to magically be a resulting number when you divide nothing?

In: Mathematics

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I like the approach of seeing division as reverse multiplication. When I ask what 12/3 is, I’m really asking “what number times 3 gives me 12?”. In this case, 12/3=4 precisely because 4×3=12.

The nice thing here is that in any case where you’re dividing by a non-zero number, the result will be unique, so we can invent a number like 17/31 as “the number that, when multiplied by 31, produces 17”.

If I asked what 1/0 is, I’m looking to find a number that when multiplied by 0 gives 1. This doesn’t work because 0 times any number is 0. There is not a single number that will qualify to be 1/0, so it’s undefined. The same logic can work for any non-zero number divided by 0. But what about 0/0? After all, any number times 0 is 0. And that’s the problem with 0/0. Because any number can be multiplied by 0 to get 0 (3×0=0, 15.9×0=0, -2×0=0, etc), we lose the uniqueness of division I mentioned before. So we leave 0/0 undefined as well.

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