You may remember learning way back in grade school that you can’t divide by zero. You may remember being told that division by zero is undefined. But have you ever wondered why we can’t divide by zero? Couldn’t the answer just be zero? We get zero when we multiply by zero, so why not when we divide?
But dividing is the opposite (or inverse) of multiplying, so if multiplying by zero gives zero, then maybe dividing by zero gives us… infinity? But infinity isn’t a number (it’s an idea), so that doesn’t work, either.
In this post I’ll dig into why division by zero is undefined.
The first
This post contains the post statistics charts I didn’t have room for in
The other face of 


I’ve mentioned before that, after ten years of retired idleness, this year I’ve applied myself to getting some long-standing items off my TODO list. I’m a lazy beaver, not a busy one, but I’ve been less lazy than usual in 2023. (Perhaps, in part, because, on several counts, I can’t believe it’s actually 2023. I remember a time when 2001 seemed far off… in the future.)











