How many bikes do you own?

@middle, yer but , no but, yer but, no but, yer but,
thats a non sum, starting with 0, ....someone help me here....

One could argue the 0 is the most important number of all...

42.

Is 0 technically a number? Seems to me it's the absence of numbers (where as negative integers are the number of absences of numbers, if you follow what I mean?).

I made this up, and no sweet fuck all about math(s), but it makes sense to me.

Whence the italicised word 'number'...

Whence

oooooh!

That's right... Aitch just got pwned...

Did I? fuck.

(How? by you using 'whence' incorrectly?)

Fuck...

haha!

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_number[/ame]

Read the bit about basic properties. Zero is in fact a number.

Cheers, Em.

I read it, and it does, in fact, say zero is a number. Why this is a case, I can't really make out. Explain it to me at the pub one day.

Can I come too? Perhaps we can discuss how many bikes we own, whilst we're doing such interesting topics.

Aitch, read this: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Zero.html

Can I come too? Perhaps we can discuss how many bikes we own, whilst we're doing such interesting topics.
You own x bikes. Where x is equal to "Who gives a shit!".

Zero was invented in India, I saw that on telly, I don't think I have anything else to offer this discussion.

Zero was invented in India, I saw that on telly, I don't think I have anything else to offer this discussion.

There's simply no way of providing proof for that. I hate poorly researched maths programs.
No one area can lay claim to having invented zero. Let alone one country.

I believe you'll find that it's all about E17

+1

There's simply no way of providing proof for that. I hate poorly researched maths programs.
No one area can lay claim to having invented zero. Let alone one country.

It was actually the first appearance of a mathematical symbol for zero rather than the concept of. Not sure it was badly researched, probably considerably simplified, this was the series...

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Maths[/ame]

I believe you'll find that it's all about 17

That was my maths teacher's favourite number.

Dear OPer.

All the active members are thinking, but not saying,that the ideal number of bikes is for most of us n+1, where n=the number of bikes you currently have. Some of us then get to the watershed of n-1. That's when you have admitted you have a problem, or not enough room, or an angry co-habitee, or a combination thereof. Or just realised you have more than you need.

Henry's just going through n-4 or something. :(

That was my maths teacher's favourite number.
Did he ever say why?

I'm not sure. If he did, I can't remember. He just used it constantly in examples. I do remember that another maths teacher of mine had 60 as his favourite number, and that was because it had lots of divisors for such a small number and other aspects of what you could do with it mathematically.

Interestingly, he wasn't such a great mathematician (so said all the good mathematicians, I wouldn't have known) but an excellent teacher, whereas the number 17 guy was a very good mathematician (so said all the ...) and a not-quite-so-excellent teacher. I'd assume that his reasons for liking 17 would have been less arithmetical than the other guy's, who loved mental arithmetic, which is apparently frowned upon by real mathematicians.

An illusion shattered. I thought mathematicians sat around doing very hard sums with very big numbers without even using a calculator.

I had a maths teacher who's party piece was to work out the square root of any number in his head, don't know if he was a good mathematician, I'm evidence that he probably wasn't a good teacher, and I think we can all see that he was not much fun at parties.

I'm just saying that because all the guys who got starred As in maths were almost comically unable to do any mental arithmetic. I was always quite good at it, and I'm a very bad mathematician. I just do it by remembering the words to the numbers, and hey presto. The good mathematicians never liked doing the work with actual numbers but always wanted to do the hard proofs, which I could never do. I suppose that really you'd need to be good at both to be a good mathematician, but they were either too one-sided or never did much work on it.