• addie@feddit.ukEnglish
    13·
    3 months ago

    For a long time, the editors of maths Wikipedia took objection to any ‘simplifying’ edits to make things more accessible, if they even slightly changed the meaning. Seems like a misunderstanding of what an encyclopedia is for, to me - overview first, expand afterwards. But I suppose mathematicians wouldn’t be mathematicians if they weren’t borderline obsessive. That first definition is probably more ‘correct’ although you’re quite correct that it’s almost unreadable.

    Huh. Didn’t think that a field needed to have division defined on it, at least not in the ‘multiplication is the opposite of division’ way you’d expect. Learn something new every day.

    • SockOlm [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Huh. Didn’t think that a field needed to have division defined on it, at least not in the ‘multiplication is the opposite of division’ way you’d expect. Learn something new every day.

      actually I dont think it does. A field has addition and multiplication as operations.

      To get subtraction you have a negative element for each element in the field (such that a + (-a) = 0). similarly there is an inverse of every element exept 0 (a * 1/a = 1)

      but then it might aswell be like defining 4 operations so thats maybe a better way to think about it