The numbers between zero and one are where all of the fun is!
0.25 / 0.5 = 0.5
0.25 = 0.5 × 0.5
1/4 = 1/2 × 1/2Intuitively speaking, how many times does half of a thing fit into a quarter of a thing? The answer is, exactly one half time.
How many halves fit into a quarter? Half of them
That’s exactly how I think of it, so strange someone downvoted you
25/5=5
o.O
I think, it is the real world logic that makes it hard to grasp. If you divide something with something small it becomes bigger. Mathematically it’s easy and makes sense, but it it’s somehow not intuitive. Especially for young me :)
Except that’s not what’s written.
It’s 0.25/0.5
Raising it exponentially would be
2.5/5, or
25/50=50
1/2≠50. Does not compute.
That’s the same as 2/2=1 3/3=1 268/268=1 …
Divide by 1/2 or multiply with 2/1. Its an equivalent transformation.
Man, I thought this is an ADHD meme when trying to sleep and your brain starts to do random shit.
A quarter is one half of one half. Makes perfect sense.
That would be 0.25 = 0.5*0.5 and rearranged equation doesn’t help unless you understand it anyway
1×2=2
Wow. Much brain. Maths wow.
It won’t keep you up if you just think of Divide as just multiplying by the fraction
The math looks perfectly fine. But when people phrase “half of a quarter” I think they have (1/2)*(1/4) in mind, instead of 0.25/0.5
But this isn’t “half of a quarter” this is “the reciprocal of a half, of a quarter”
Half of a quarter is 0.25/2 or 0.25*1/2
I know, but to me this meme doesn’t make sense to me unless I assume the person reading the math Expression is interpreting its real world application.
25 / 5 = 5 and nobodies head exploded. That’s just evaluating a math Expression. .25 / .5 = .5 is the same. It’s not a “my brain can’t comprehend how to evaluate expressions” as the meme suggests.
However, if someone who doesnt do much algebra thought to themselves “I need half of a quarter”, then I could understand why their brain might “hurt” as the meme suggests, for a similar reason why adding 20 degree Celsius water to 20 degree Celsius water doesn’t make 40 degree Celsius wate
I’m probably reading into it too much, but the meme just doesn’t feel like a “mind fuck that keeps me up at night”. I’m looking for reasons to try and explain it, but it’s just a math expression at the end of the day
I think the meme is an exaggeration of the situation for comedic effect. It just looks silly at first glance, I don’t believe the OP is kept up at night by this, and is rather making a remark about how it doesn’t instantly feel intuitive as a result (to use the 20 Celsius water example, its the same kind of momentary “wtf?” as 40 Celsius water not being twice as hot as 20 Celsius water. After a moment you remember “oh derp yeah we’re missing 273.15 kelvin in this picture lol”)
I think you nailed the confusion in this meme.
To simplify: it’s confusing that ½ = 0.5, but 1/2 ≠ 1/0.5
Yeah I was gonna comment that 0.25*(1/0.5) = 0.5 doesn’t look nearly as weird
I didn’t specify fully, but I was just thinking 1/4 * 2/1
Imo, as soon as you write it as 0.25 multiplied by a fraction it works, because you can then easily see that it’s the same as (1/4)*2
You have one apple. You divide it into quarters, so that you have 0.25 of an apple. Now divide it in half. So yes well technically you do have one half of 0.25 (and 0.5 is the answer that a calculator will return) what you actually have is 1/8 of an apple (0.125).
This is what pisses me off about Matt half the time. You end up with something that in the abstract makes sense because it’s just numbers, but then if you try to make it make sense in real life it’s stupid.
Your confusion comes from the fact that dividing a quarter in half is 0.25/2. That’s not what’s shown in the comic dividing by 0.5 is the same as multiplying by 2. It’s just a quirk of syntax, the way we write math. If you spelled it out using English the comic would say “multiplying a quarter by two equals a half”. The confusion just stems from someone’s unfamiliarity with mathematical notation.
exactly. failure of english, not math. Math allows fairly accurate descriptions of the universe, humans (and especially languages) evolved to adequately percieve the narrow band of qualia that have been relevant to survival
Fractions are just funky when dividing. Dividing by 0.5 is the same multiplying by 2.
Your analogy is really close, but backwards is all. If you have a quarter of an apple. In order to get half a whole apple, you need another quarter. Two quarters make a half, so dividing a quarter by 0.5 gives you 2 quarters. Dividing a quarter by 2 gives you 0.5 of the original quarter which is your 1/8th
,25/,5 x 100/100 = 25/50 = 1/2
Why was that hard?
100/100 = 1, because any number divided by itself is 1.
And any number multiplied by 1 is still that number.
If you give half a person a quarter of a thing, how much would you be giving a full person? That’s right baby, half a thing. Don’t sweat it.
This just comes down to the fact that “dividing by a fraction is the same as multiplying by the inverse of the fraction” is an easy rule to follow but not particularly intuitive. In natural language, when most people hear “divide by half” they’re actually picturing “divide by two” in their head.
