I use xe/xem or they/them pronouns ATM.

I wanna be a cat girl! Or a cat enby perhaps. Nyan.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’d imagine you want something defined recursively like multiplication

    • ( 0x = 0 )
    • ( xy = x(y-1)+ x ) ( y > 0 ).

    So it needs to be

    • ( x^0 = c ) (c is some constant)
    • ( x^y = xx^{y-1} ) (( y > 0 ) (to see why, replace multiplication with exponentiation and addition with multiplication). So what could ( c ) be? Well, the recursive exponentiation definition we want refers to ( x^0 ) in ( x^1 ). ( x^1 ) must be ( x ) by the thing we wish to capture in the formalism (multiplication repeated a single time). So the proposed formalism has ( x = x^1 = xx^0 = xc ). So ( cx = x ) hence ( c = 1 ), the multiplicative identity. Anything else would leave exponentiation to a zeroth power undefined, require a special case for a zeroth power and make the base definition that of ( x^1 ), or violate the intuition that exponentiation is repeated multiplication.

    On an unrelated note, it’d be nice if Lemmy had Mathjax. I just wrote all this on mobile with that assumption, and I’m not rewriting now that I know better.


















  • Wikipedia called these fencepost errors at one point (they now just say it is the specific type of off-by-one error in which you miscount the posts (vertices) or panels (arcs) in a fence (graph) by using one to count the other). I read this before my first programming class and then mentioned the term to my professor. She had no idea what I was talking about 😅