Dividing by 0

So this week I won't be talking about anything, in fact I will be talking about absolutely nothing. Naught. Zilch. Zero to be precise.

So zero means nothing. It is the number we use for when we do not have something, invented by the Sumerians along with pretty much all of the numbers, first used by a guy called Brahmagupta who used dots to symbolise the number, eventually becoming the number that we all know and love (or hate depending on the context) today.

But what zero is really is an absence, like a vacuum in science or a blank page in english, zero is what we have when we have nothing else, some even argue that it isn't even a number, but the real question is what is so difficult about dividing by zero?

we can add zero and add zero too other stuff because 1 + 0 = 1 and 0 + 1 = 1, and we can subtract where we enter the world of the negative numbers 0 - 1 = -1 and so on and so forth. We can even multiply by this phantom of the numerical world, which will always result in 0 because you really just have x amounts of nothing. We can even divide 0 by numbers for the same reason. But why is the division by this evil oval so special?

Imagine the chocolate bar analogy we were all taught back in our numeracy lessons, if our chocolate bar has six pieces and we divide them between three people then each will have two. But when you are dividing it between 0 people how much do they get each? None. Because there are no people.

Then why is it not just 0 I hear you ask? Well here is the problem: at its heart division is just glorified subtraction, how much do we have to subtract x from y to make 0, for example 8/2 = 4.
8 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 = 0 we have 4 twos therefore there are 4 twos in 8.
However if we divide 8 by 0 we get:
8 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 - 0 = 8

which will stretch on for forever, which is far more than I can type on this blog. No matter how many zeros you subtract you will never get less than 8, therefore proving that division by zero doesn't result in 0 or even infinity, it can literally just not be done.

Thank you for reading guys, I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read this and hopefully you find even maths as interesting as I do! Because at the end of the day everything around us can be simplified to maths. In the same way that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, pure maths is the poetry of logical ideas and rational minds. Be sure to come back next week and thanks for reading :)