• hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      X/0.5 = X*2

      Division by less than 1 is essentially multiplying with extra steps

      • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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        8 months ago

        Huh, thanks for the insight. I’ve never been able to get my head around weird division like this, and that sounds like a great rule of thumb for thinking about it.

        • TastehWaffleZ@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Dividing by a fraction is the same as flipping one it on its head and multiplying it.

          0.25/0.5 is (1/4)/(1/2)

          To multiply it we’d flip one, either works but for this example I decided to flip the second one: (1/4) * (2/1)

          The top half of the fractions (numerators) multiply together, then the bottoms (denominators) multiply together. (1*2)/(4*1) = 2/4 which reduces to 1/2

    • drengbarazi@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      same as x * .5 = .25 if that somehow helps ya

      I suspect people might be getting confused by this because of colloquialisms like “divided in half”, “divided in the middle”, “divided by two”

      things is, math doesn’t care about idioms

      another area in mathematics that I’ve seen ppl (myself included lmao) suffer from this is propositional logic. like with the non exclusive nature of the OR operator

      but this is all just a wild guess