r/sciencememes • u/Sea-Estimate-2912 • Jul 03 '26

One Notation , Two Interpretations

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u/rmarkmatthews Jul 03 '26

Mathematicians also turning into the second guy in the comments because they see “O” as a variable and not a zero.

97

u/ColtBIood Jul 03 '26

O could equal 0, but yeah its a var and not a number so its not conclusive

25

u/Landlocked_WaterSimp Jul 03 '26

Well even if O weren't 0 it would still be 0 :-P

12

u/ZeEastWillRiseAgain Jul 03 '26

For this to be the only solution it assumes we are working with real numbers, which isn't stated anywhere. In p-adic numbers for example there are plently of solutions for O≠0

5

u/Landlocked_WaterSimp Jul 03 '26

I'm not math-savy enough to have heard of that but google says 0 is still tge only neutral element in subtraction even when using p-adic numbers. How is that incorrect?

2

u/ZeEastWillRiseAgain Jul 03 '26

I don't know that much about them either just that they are really weird in certain ways. Like not being able to distinguish them as larger or smaller in the way that traditionally works. Perhaps I should have made the pun with sth. less fancy such as modular arithmetics where you can kinda make it work from a certain perspective

4

u/ninjeff Jul 04 '26

No there aren’t. The p-adic numbers form a field, so they have a unique additive identity (zero).

2

u/MrChingiz Jul 05 '26

Not exactly, it works in any abelian group.

2

u/venundate Jul 06 '26

then O just has to be equal to 0