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Cultural phenomenon
With the rise of the Internet, debates about 0.999… have become commonplace on newsgroups and message boards, including many that nominally have little to do with mathematics. In the newsgroup sci.math, arguing over 0.999… is described as a “popular sport”, and it is one of the questions answered in its FAQ.[43]
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sci.math FAQ: Why is 0.9999... = 1?
Someone needs to Godwin the .999…=1 discussion before it subsumes another forum like the borg
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Is “arbitrarily close” good enough for a proof? If they are different then 1 - .999… = x for some x>0? But, nope.
Excision gone wild!
Yes. Standard technique in introductory real analysis is to prove a sequence equals something by showing that for any arbitrarily small gamma the difference between the sequence and the target is less than gamma for sufficiently large n.
Let’s not rehash old 2p2 threads
Rigorized your post.
Also, it’s standard to use epsilon, not gamma, at least in every real analysis text I’ve seen.
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Paging @diebitter
I would just like to state on record that I did not start this thread - and that personally I think it should be deleted.
Well I dunno, it looks sort of incriminating in the wrong light…
mod audit trail needed
Oh shit, the fuck did I start? Thread needs to be nuked into orbit.
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…isn’t that just 1%?
Best math student I knew as an undergrad smoked pot at least once a day probably starting at like 13 years old.
He had mental/emotional problems that stopped him from completing his PhD though. I don’t know if being a stoner had any part in causing that or not.
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Why are decimal quantities less than 1 plural?
Erm, they are?
When speaking, yes.
“I have point five oranges”
“Zero shits given”
“I have point five of an orange” sounds correct to me: you wouldn’t say “I have a half oranges”. I can’t say I’ve heard your way often in spoken language, but it might be a regional thing.
Zero might be an exception for other reasons.
“Zero point six centimeters”
Hmm. Might be different for units of measure (centimetres, grams, litres etc.), maybe because they’re inherently continuous?
You still wouldn’t say “half centimetres”, “six tenths centimetres” though, so I agree, it is pretty inconsistent whichever way you look at it.
The top 0.099999… percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 89.99999… percent.
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