I accept, but don’t really get why #x0=0. After all, if I have 1 frisbee and multiply it by 0 frisbees, how come my original frisbee ceases to exist? (I am very bad with arithmetic, so bad I never made it to real math, just kept getting shoved into remedial classes. Strangely enough, I did prove to have an aptitude for low-level scripting when computers became a thing for regular folks, as well as earning my living as a bookkeeper for several years. Weird.)
I guess the idea is that a thing doesn’t exist without a place for it to exist. So if you have 1 frisbee spread among nothing, you effectively have nothing.
More pragmatically, whenever this sort of thing comes up, I just figure that we can balance our checkbooks, send rockets to the moon and code a working game of Pac-Man so obviously 1x1=1 and 1x0=0 is working just fine for us.
Why would you multiply one frisbee by zero frisbees? The units make no sense. You might multiply $1,000,000 per (solid gold unflyable) frisbee by zero frisbees (I wouldn’t buy one either) to get $0 spent on frisbees. Or you might have 10 frisbees on each roof in the neighborhood and multiply by the zero roofs you want to climb up on today (it’s raining) to get zero frisbees collected, but I can’t think of any reason (or any mathematically sound way) to multiply a frisbee times a frisbee
The frisbee could be a unit of measurement. If I take all my frisbees and lay them on the ground in a grid A frisbees wide by B frisbees long, how many frisbees do I have? Multiply A x B.
In a grid that is zero frisbees wide (A = 0), the length of the grid could be anything (B = *), and the frisbee count (A x B) would be zero.
X is the number of boxes. Y is the number of frisbees per box. Z is the total number of frisbees you have.
So if you have 3 boxes and each box has 2 frisbees, you have a total of 6 frisbees.
3*2=6
Now, if Y is 0, meaning each box is empty, then you have no frisbees. It doesn’t matter how many boxes you have, if you have a million empty boxes you still have no frisbees. Hence, the answer (Z) will always be 0. Remember that Z only means the total number of frisbees you have in this equation.
I think the confusion lies in forgetting what the solution to the equation represents. It doesn’t literally mean nothing, full stop. It means you have none of a particular thing; in this case, no frisbees. When you’re using math for a practical application, it’s very important to remember what each value represents in the real world, and don’t mix up abstract mathematical concepts with practical reality.
The number 0 doesn’t have to mean a literal absence of anything when it’s applied to a practical usage, it just means the absence of something. You have to remember what that “something” is for the math to be useful.
If you translate multiplication to something like “You have x boxes and y frisbees in each box, how many frisbees do you have total” and then the specifics is you have 0 boxes, then you never had any frisbee at all.
Are you thinking about this like mitosis or something? Multiplication isn’t reality, it’s an abstraction. Just because you write 1 x 0 doesn’t mean a physical object disappears into the ether.
