News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:1/0 = 0 (2018) by scarmig on Sunday December 01, 2024 @05:05PM (#42291072)
Floats don't have multiplicative inverses, and the floating point operations don't give us any of the mathematical structures we expect of numbers. Floating point division already abandons algebra for the sake of usefulness.
Re:1/0 = 0 (2018) by mjcohen on Sunday December 01, 2024 @06:11PM (#42291446)
Knuth vol 2 has a nice discussion of floating point operations and shows how to reason about them. Wilkinson's classic "Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes" (1966) also has a good discussion.