superpollo wrote:
Steve Holden ha scritto:
superpollo wrote:
Patrick Maupin ha scritto:
On Apr 2, 2:41 pm, Andreas Waldenburger <use...@geekmail.invalid>
wrote:

While everyone else is mocking you: Can you please elaborate on why you want to know and what kind of problem you're trying to solve with this?
Also, don't you think you should have picked a maths forum for this
kind of question?
Methinks the OP is fluent in the way of choosing newsgroups.
According to google, he has posted 6855 messages in 213 groups.

http://groups.google.com/groups/profile?enc_user=ul3SQhIAAAAYmLD0Oj5Yxp-liP3Vw9uApbyajUBv9M9XLUB2gqkZmQ


And I can't speak for anybody else, but I just assumed it was an April
Fool's question.  I meant to be laughing with the OP, not at him, so
sorry if I misunderstood.
no no you understood prfectly *but* the thing is i am a regular in an
italian language math ng which is haunted by a crackpot who insists that
1/2 * 1/2 cannot be 1/4, "because multiplication means getting bigger",
so i took a semi-serious stance and made a few posts as a statistical
tentative to "convince" said crackpot that the world is not going crazy
(but maybe he is)

thanks

ps: note that my nickname is not unique, and there are a few people
whith the same one... and i didn't ever post using googlegroups

If you think you will persuade a crackpot to drop his lunacy by logical
argument you are clearly an optimist of the first water. But since I
like a challenge (and bearing in mind this is OT so I don't claim to be
an expert) you might try first of all persuading him to agree to the
commutativity of multiplication (i.e. x * y == y * x for any x and y).

If he agrees to that, then get him to agree that x * 1 == x for any x.

If he agrees to that

he does not, since "you cannot multiply something, and not getting some more of it" ... he is stuck with the latin etimology of "multiply" ("multiplicare" means "increase quantity", like in the fish and bread miracle)

Do he also think that division always makes it smaller? What about
division by a half?
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