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. ...
The easiest way to explain divide by zero is to think of division as repeated subtraction. For a simple example of 4 / 2 we know that we would have to subtract 2 from 4 twice to reduce it to 0.
When we divide by zero we’re functionally asking how many times can we remove zero from the numerator until it is reduced to zero. We typically state the answer as infinity or NaN because we know that we could do this operation indefinitely without the numerator reducing to 0.
The easiest way to explain divide by zero is to think of division as repeated subtraction. For a simple example of 4 / 2 we know that we would have to subtract 2 from 4 twice to reduce it to 0.
When we divide by zero we’re functionally asking how many times can we remove zero from the numerator until it is reduced to zero. We typically state the answer as infinity or NaN because we know that we could do this operation indefinitely without the numerator reducing to 0.