Friday, December 11, 2009

A Neat Mathematical Trick

What is 1 minus 0.99 (repeating)? The answer is rather surprising: it's zero. A colleague of mine revealed to me how this can be the case. When you subtract 0.99 (repeating) from 1, you are left with 0.00 (repeating). You will never "reach" that final "1" at the end of the string of zeros because you can always add another zero since the number of zeros repeats indefinitely. Ergo, 1 minus 0.99 (repeating) is always zero. Cool, huh?