Guest Post provided by Shana Donohue.
I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, escaped to Amherst for 4 years to learn Environmental Sciences at UMass, escaped back to Worcester to become a substitute teacher, and then escaped to Boston. Now I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, am just about through a Masters in Math Education from the Harvard Extension School and am teaching math full-time at South Boston High School. Life is good. No one told me as a kid that things wouldn’t be smooth yet by age 33, but I keep it pushin’.
“Because the universe will blow up,” was the usual answer I got when my teachers tried to explain why we couldn’t divide by zero. From a young age, I was a sort of anti-Pythagorean in that I believed people created numbers, not that the universe was ruled by them. So why then did we create the divide-by-zero bomb?
The best way I’ve found to describe why dividing by zero will destroy everything is to go back to translating fractions. What does “1/2” really mean? “1/2” translates to “1 out of 2” or “I have one piece of candy out of the two pieces on the table, so I have half of what is on the table. My sister is a good sharer.”
Now try this with “0/2”. This translates to “zero out of 2” or “I have zero pieces of the two that are on the table. My sister’s cheap!”
Both of these situations are real. You can have one piece of candy out of two. You can have none of the pieces of candy. Even if the fraction is an improper fraction, like “3/2”, certainly you can’t have three out of two pieces of candy; this makes no sense at all. But then we remember that improper fractions can be written into mixed fractions, so “3/2” becomes “1 and ½”, and we sure can have 1 and a half of the pieces of candy on the table [leaving our cheap sister with just ½! Haha!]!
So then comes “2/0”, which would translate to “2 out of zero” or “I have two pieces of candy out of the zero that are on the table.” HUH?? This obviously doesn’t make sense! Despite what Little Orphan Annie and Jay-Z may lead us to believe, you can’t make something out of nothing. It’s just basic physics.
Once a student begins learning about slope and functions, the impossibility of “2/0” becomes even more obvious. Let’s think of a graph that measures your height against your age. “2/0” represents a rise (y-value or “height”) of 2 and a run (x-value or “time”) of 0. This is to say that, for example, at time 0 you are 2 feet tall. Ok, so maybe you were born 2 feet tall. That’s possible. Now let’s move up from coordinate (0, 2). The slope of “2/0” tells us to move up 2 and over 0. We move up two spaces to 4 feet tall and over to… over to nothing! We stay at zero! So a slope of “2/0” says that you can be 2 feet and 4 feet tall at the same point in time. This is impossible!
Links:
http://zerosumruler.wordpress.com/
http://www.etsy.com/listing/44999877/
www.youtube.com/user/ZeroSumRuler/