Re:What's the difference between 0/0 and 1/0?
by daveFNbuck on Friday May 24, 2019 @10:24PM
(#20006739)
You can have a multiplicative inverse of 0 if 0 = 1. This results in a field with only a single element.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:What's the difference between 0/0 and 1/0?
by gizmo686 on Friday May 24, 2019 @10:33PM
(#20006762)
Unless your definition of field include the non-triviality axiom that 0 != 1.
Re:What's the difference between 0/0 and 1/0?
by throwawaymath on Saturday May 25, 2019 @01:46PM
(#20010266)
The definition of a field explicitly requires the additive and multiplicative identities to be distinct elements. You can't induce a field structure on a singleton set. You can construct a trivial ring, but the trivial ring does not comprise a trivial field because it fails to be an integral domain.
To be fair this is mathematical pedantry when we're talking about trivial objects. But in principle it's meaningful because every field you can construct will lose critical properties if you allow one element to be both the additive and multiplicative identity. Unfortunately authors don't always make it clear that you need both existence and uniqueness when they state the field axioms.