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The goal is to encourage people to approach mathematics in a fashion that makes it accessible. In order to do this, we're going to need a few basic rules.
- Try to be on topic.
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Pretty simple, huh? Yeah... I reduced them to the lowest common denominator. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Off-topic is tolerated to some extent. Submissions should all be about mathematics, or clearly relate to mathematics. However, once you get into the comments section, it's a much looser standard. Discourse is encouraged, so long as civility is maintained. Good conversations tend to meander around topics and that's perfectly acceptable.
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Some terms:
- WDT Weekly Discussion Thread
Greek Alphabet:
Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω
Hebrew Alphabet:
א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ/ך ל מ/ם נ/ן ס ע פ/ף צ/ץ ק ר ש ת
Other common symbols:
¬ → ⇒ ⇔ ∀ ∂ ∃ ∅ ∇ ∈ ∉ √ ∞ ∧ ∨ ∩ ∪ ⊕ ∫ ≈ ≠ ≡ ≤ ≥ ⊆ ⊂ ⊃ ⊄ ° ± · × ⟌ ÷ ⌊ ⌋ ⌈ ⌉ ➀ ℤ ℕ ℙ ℚ ℝ ℂ ℍ ℭ
If you're interested in academia, you can feel free to also join us at v/PrincipiaAcademia where we discuss all things academic.
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[–] Opieswife ago
So I feel like this would make more sense but I am missing a fundamental or two. Can you help so I can reread this again and hopefully make sense of it. I think I am close...
Ok what does floating mean? That you can move essentially on a number like between both positive and negative numbers? Both to what I visualize is to the left and right if zero? Or does this mean something completely different?
Next question I have not seen a double sign before. I don't know how to make it on my keyboard but I am talking about the plus over the mibus sign before the 0.0. Does that mean the 0.0 or whatever number follows can be either positive or negative?
Thanks once I know what these mean I will try reading again and see if I can get further and make more sense out of this.
[–] VIP740 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
LOL! OK so the computer represents everything with ones and zeros. You have ASCII characters like 'A'=01000001, and '0'=00110000. It's easy to represent positive integers. So in one byte we could store 256 values, which could be interpreted as 0 - 255: 00000000, 00000001, 00000010, 00000011, 00000100... But what if we need to store negative numbers? Well if we add one to 255 (11111111), each digit carries over, leaving eight zeros and a carry that flies off into never never land. So 11111111 can be interpreted as 255, or -1. To change the sign of a binary number you can first not each bit (change zeros to ones and ones to zeroes), and add 1 to the result. Floating point numbers can have fractional values. It's called floating point because we have a section of bits that changes the location of the decimal. Lets say we have four digits and a point to represent a decimal number, like 4329. We could change the size of our numbers by moving the decimal: 4329, 432.9, 43.29, 4.329, .4329. The computer does something like that in binary. The position of the point is determined by the first few bits, and the other bits are interpreted as being multiplied by that power of 2.
[–] Opieswife ago
This is interesting. I get the part about changing the size of the numbers by moving the decimal, I guess I didn't realize what this was called. I learned some binary when I got into networking. I can visualize and count using binary and I totally enjoyed subnetting when we got to that lesson but we never talked about or touched on negatives.
I also enjoyed it when we counted with other bases, hex was a fun topic but I imagine there is still much to learn and we likely barely scratched the surface. I wish there were lessons on these things when I was in school. Maybe there were and I was just in the wrong class.
At some point hopefully I will have time to go back to school and work my way up starting with a review of the fundamentals to what are clearly more interesting topics that I missed.
[–] TheBuddha [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Well, we're going to have to start back at what are numbers and work our way out from there! ;-)
I can do that - but it might be slow. I'm going to do a music dump in the guitar sub. But, here's a link to get you started. When you get that, just say so.
http://web.mst.edu/~kosbar/test/ff/elem/typesofnumbers.html
If you'd rather listen to music:
https://voat.co/v/guitar/2248107
(I'm an accomplished musician, my background is in classical guitar but began with percussion instruments. Playing in a band helped me provide extra money.)