ProgrammerHumor
customerStillWontUnderstand
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When your textbook is trying to justify its own price by teaching you the real value of large numbers.
Only the real value? Do you have to by another book for the imaginary component? Where does it end with these people?!
No no, you can use the same book, just rotate it 90°. However, they will charge you a $100 consultancy fee to tell you whether to rotate clockwise or counterclockwise.
Counterclockwise to maintain sign and clockwise to switch it when going from real to imaginary, vice versa for vice versa. There I pirated it for you.
One of the first project i had as a student was a bignum handler, something for those very large numbers. And by very, we were expected to handle numbers that take several MB to store.
Very fun to do.
Excellent! Presumably by "handler" you mean that it was capable of basic arithmetic, input and output (or conversions from/to strings), and such. Fun AND instructive.
Yep exactly, basic operations and memory management
Awesome. Did you implement division? That's quite a bit more challenging than addition/subtraction and multiplication.
I don't remember tbh, it's been quite some time. I guess.
Makes sense.
Remember that the mathematical proof for 1+1=2 takes 162 pages, but due to that, we can now use that as a axiom which does not need expansion.
If such axiom doesn't exist, such as for the terms "small numbers", "large numbers" and "Very large numbers", a definition is needed, even if that definition is stating the obvious.
It takes 162 pages to proof using a very narrow subset of mathematics.
Using a much more reasonable set of it you can break it down in a few lines. Even with rigorous mathematics instead of hand waving.
Very very large number = the price of the textbook
42 sounds like a small number if you’re talking about tickets sold to your stadium show. But it sounds like a large number when it’s the number of years you’re sentenced to prison.
That's because 42 tickets can't be subdivided into a more fundamental unit. There are no militickets, femtotickets or Planck-tickets.
Years are not fundamental and we can subdivide it into smaller units. 42 years in Planck time is on the order of ~1052.
Obviously this argument doesn't hold for every set with subdivisible cardinality but I'm to lazy to think of a counter example. Truthfully, I just wanted to think of how many plank time units were in 42 years. Each one of them and agonizing moment of existence.
42 is a small number when added to 1030, but a large number when added to 10-30.
When your textbook is written by Captain Obvious with a Ph.D. in Stating the Obvious.
More obvious than a fox who has just been appointed Professor of Obviousness at Cambridge University.