Science Memes

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I just cited myself. (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

TBH the name is a bit misleading. Same for "real" numbers. And oh so much more so for "normal numbers".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

not really. i get it because we use rational to mean logical, but that's not what it means here. yeah, real and normal are stupid names but rational numbers are numbers that can be represented as a ratio of two numbers. i think it's pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I know all of that, but it's still misleading. It's not a dumb name by any means, but it still causes confusion often (as evidenced by many comments here)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

fair enough, but i think the confusion for that commenter comes from a misunderstanding of the definition of the mathematical concept rather than the meaning of the English word. they just think irrational numbers are those that have infinite decimal digits, which is not the definition.