2022-03-03 Archiv

Leanorris.

Hey! I heard that Lean thinks 1/0 = 0. Is that true?

Yes. So do Coq and Agda and many other theorem provers.

[...]

But doesn’t that lead to confusion?

It certainly seems to lead to confusion on Twitter. But it doesn’t lead to confusion when doing mathematics in a theorem prover. Mathematicians don’t divide by 0 and hence in practice they never notice the difference between real.div and mathematical division (for which 1/0 is undefined). Indeed, if a mathematician is asking what Lean thinks 1/0 is, one might ask the mathematician why they are even asking, because as we all know, dividing by 0 is not allowed in mathematics, and hence this cannot be relevant to their work.

Xena: Division by zero in type theory: a FAQ