Why division by zero is undefined

Udesh Kavinda
2 min readOct 4, 2021

As much as we would like to have an answer for “what’s divided by 0?” it’s sadly impossible to have an answer. The reason, in short, is that whatever we may answer, we will then have to agree that that answer times 0 equals to Dividend , and that cannot be ​true, because anything times 0 is 0.Therefore we do not consider any number divide by zero as infinity.

To explain this we get 1 divided by 0

When we trying to reach zero form positive side (0.1,0.01,0.001,0.0001) as we go towards to zero, the result will getting very large.

When we trying to reach zero form negative side (-0.1,-0.01,-0.001,-0.0001) as we go towards to zero, the result will getting very small.

These two are never going to meet each other because these two go in two different ways .Hence we can’t decide the value of the the one divide by zero

In computing, a program error may result from an attempt to divide by zero. Depending on the programming environment and the type of number being divided by zero, it may generate positive or negative infinity by the IEEE 754 floating point standard, generate an exception, generate an error message, cause the program to terminate, result in a special not-a-number value, or crash.

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Udesh Kavinda
Udesh Kavinda

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