• SpeakerToLampposts@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I recall an anecdote about a mathematician being asked to clarify precisely what he meant by “a close approximation to three”. After thinking for a moment, he replied “any real number other than three”.

        • mpa92643@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          “Approximately equal” is just a superset of “equal” that also includes values “acceptably close” (using whatever definition you set for acceptable).

          Unless you say something like:

          a ≈ b ∧ a ≠ b

          which implies a is close to b but not exactly equal to b, it’s safe to presume that a ≈ b includes the possibility that a = b.

        • myslsl@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Yes, informally in the sense that the error between the two numbers is “arbitrarily small”. Sometimes in introductory real analysis courses you see an exercise like: “prove if x, y are real numbers such that x=y, then for any real epsilon > 0 we have |x - y| < epsilon.” Which is a more rigorous way to say roughly the same thing. Going back to informality, if you give any required degree of accuracy (epsilon), then the error between x and y (which are the same number), is less than your required degree of accuracy

        • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          4 months ago

          It depends on the convention that you use, but in my experience yes; for any equivalence relation, and any metric of “approximate” within the context of that relation, A=B implies A≈B.

    • RustyNova@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Nah. They are supposed to not care about stuff and just roll with it without any regrets.

      It’s just like the wojak crying with the mask on, but not crying behind it.

      There’s plenty of cases of memes where the giga chad is just plainly wrong, but they just don’t care. But it’s not supposed to be in a troll way. The giga chad applies what it believes in. If you want a troll, there’s troll face, who speak with the confidence of a giga chad, but know he is bullshiting