I saw this Reddit post today saying "My son's third-grade teacher taught my son that 1 divided by 0 is 0. I wrote her an email to tell her that it is not 0. ...
That’s not what division is though. Division, at least when talking about splitting a pizza, has 2 options.
The first is splitting it into X equal parts. If you split a pizza into 0 equal parts, how large is each part?
The other option with pizza would be to say you are splitting into some unknown number of slices of a specific size. if you split a pizza in to slices that are 0 inches wide, how many slices do you get?
Neither method gives any logical result when using 0 with regards to pizza.
If I have one whole pizza, and I divide it zero times, then wouldn’t I still have one whole pizza? I.e., shouldn’t
1 / 0 = 1?That’s not what division is though. Division, at least when talking about splitting a pizza, has 2 options.
The first is splitting it into X equal parts. If you split a pizza into 0 equal parts, how large is each part?
The other option with pizza would be to say you are splitting into some unknown number of slices of a specific size. if you split a pizza in to slices that are 0 inches wide, how many slices do you get?
Neither method gives any logical result when using 0 with regards to pizza.
In this example, when you say “divide it zero times”, what you are really saying is “divide it by 2, zero times”.