Nullity

Anyone ever heard of Nullity? A great new (well, about 10 years old, by now) mathematical concept (not to be confused with the other mathematical concept that goes by this name) invented by James Anderson that enables us to divide zero by itself. Along with this special "number" comes the so-called "Transreal arithmetic". So, basically Nullity is a special non-real number and defined as the result of 0 ÷ 0. It has been shown that it is also equal to 00 and 0 ⋅ ∞. The only real difference to existing concepts as NaN is that Nullity (Φ) is equal to itself, while NaN is not in standard IEEE floating point arithmetic. Apparently he even convinced a school to teach that concept and is building computers that use it. As for me, I have yet to encounter a final solution of 0 ÷ 0 and thus Φ to a problem. When dealing with limits, l'Hôspital usually takes care of that. And since most computations have their roots in maths I never encountered something that yielded NaN. Positive and negative infinity—sure, but no NaN. Furthermore, replacing NaN by Φ won't gain us anything, except for calling d.IsNullity() instead of d.IsNaN(). Just my two cents on this issue. Wikinews has a little more opinions on this.

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