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I don’t really want to start another division-by-zero post by pointing out how it is traditionally dismissed as “undefined,” but I have to, because it really is where The Engagement Paradox begins. It is easy to assume that the reason is something like “you can’t divide something into zero parts,” or that the result “would be infinite.” True or false, neither assumption identifies the real problem. Both can fall under the umbrella of “undefined” because they look like impossibilities. Thinking along those lines goes nowhere, though, because the real problem lies elsewhere. For years, I treated”n in no parts” and… ❱❱❱
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I became curious about the math to describe my interpretation of a quantum particle (as mentioned in Implications of Division by Zero and Point Paradox, the opening section of “Physics in a Distributed, Process Driven, Information-Based Universe“): Thought for the day: My mind wandered back to division by zero and it suddenly struck me that, if applicable in nature, it could be the point where a value ceases to be quanta and becomes qualia. I did not see it for a while. I got to it by thinking about what’s hidden in plain sight in the concepts of quantum mechanics,… ❱❱❱
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Introduction When division by zero is dismissed as “undefined” something crucial goes missing. The conflict that “undefined” tries to avoid is not inherent to division, rather it reflects the limitations of the interpretations used to validate or extend division in other contexts. The consequences of supplying zero from the divisor to the inverse operation of multiplication with the quotient are so obvious that it causes a crucial fact about division to slip into a blind-spot. Euclidean division excludes zero as a divisor by definition, to allow it to solve for the greatest common denominator, so it focuses on something else as well. What these objections to… ❱❱❱
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At some point last night I remembered when the whole “divide by zero” thing started for me, all the way back in grade school. We were being taught about division and it finally came up in class. The teacher wrote some fraction, which for the first time showed “0” as the denominator. She turned to us and said “You can’t do this. If you have five cookies on a plate but give them to nobody, you could say you have divided them up for no one and think, in math, it’s like 50\frac{5}{0} but in reality there are still five cookies on… ❱❱❱
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Originally Posted on Helium.com (ceased) under: Is it possible to divide a number by zero? Edit: Updated on May 31, 2026 with a more formal rearticulation of the original insights, with additional supporting math , as a companion to The Doctrine of Division‑By‑Zero. Edit: Updated on Jan 12, 2026 with supporting math conforming to the intuited logic of the original post. I always came back to this article expecting to be ashamed by my “absurd” assertions. I always came away from reading it thinking there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, even though it simply wasn’t a mathematical paper. Since the math part of… ❱❱❱
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