On Oct 1, 2009, at 4:43 PM, Jan Ingvoldstad wrote:
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 10:15 PM, Moritz Lenz <mor...@faui2k3.org>
wrote:
What's the 0th root of a number, then?
It would be a number $y for which $y ** 0 == $x, which can only be
fulfilled for $x == 1. So in the general cases the answer to the
question root($x, 0) is nonsense, which is best mapped to NaN.
That doesn't make sense. The answer is 1, not NaN.
Think about it for a while: mathematically speaking, we would expect
the 0th
root of a number to be 1.
I think you're confusing "root" with "power." Any number raised to
the zeroth power is one (except, arguably, zero itself), but, given a
number $num, its zeroth root is a number $base such that $base ** 0 ==
$num, which, as stated above, only makes sense when $num == 1.
-- Minimiscience
