Friday, December 08, 2006

Divide and be conquered

When I first read about J. Anderson's new theory of diving by zero, I was skeptical. There are numerous algebraic tricks one can play to make zero-division work out, and I would be surprised to see a novel approach to this problem so late in the game. After seeing the details of the "theory", I knew it was garbage, and suspected that it had already been dissected by M. Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math; lo and behold, it had.

In true ScienceBlogs form, Chu-Carroll pumps much more vitriol into his response than I would have. Rather than pushing my bile to the surface, it simply makes me wonder why Anderson would make such a foolhardy public display of his "discovery" without first consulting a working mathematician. England has no shortage of universities; they can't all be inaccessible from Berkshire.

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