Talk:Empty product

On the old version of Netscape I'm using at this moment, the double "=" enclosing a paragraph title make it look bigger than the article's title. (I'm going to try Internet Explorer and Mozilla and see if that continues.) Michael Hardy 03:40 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure which version of the article you're talking about: with "=" or with "==". I've never heard anybody else reporting that "==" is larger than "="; if so, that's a significant bug in the software or in your browser. Wikipedia convention is to start with "==" and go from there; "=" is only for very rare occasions. (Indeed, we only really allow it because they use on the Polish Wikipedia.)

BTW, the headers are for sections, not for paragraphs. It's a good idea to break a large paragraph into smaller ones, especially given a typical reader's short attention span these days. I also shortened the titles of the sections for readability, but if I knocked out any important text in doing so, then you could always put it back into a paragraph. Finally, I rearranged the two main sections on the grounds that people need to have some sympathy for the empty product's being one before studying a possible exception.

-- Toby 20:21 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

I think it's really stretching things to consider set theory to be a part of discrete mathematics, although I'm not sure the latter term has a precise definition. Often "discrete" implies that something nearby is finite, and set theory deals primarily with very extreme kinds of infinity that most mathematicians never hear of. Michael Hardy 20:47 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

The set theory that we're talking about here is perfectly discrete. Furthermore, set theory deals with infinities only in discrete ways -- "discrete" doesn't imply finite; it's more the other way around, actually.

Also, why don't you think there's an "of" after "raised to the power"? The grammar doesn't make sense without it.

And I agree that the link to Almost everywhere doesn't work while that article is so incomplete, focusing only on measure theory. (I don't even know if there is a measure that includes our sense or not.) But it seems rather out of the way to stress the distinction in this article, so how about just leaving it unlinked for now?

Finally, you're absolutely right about the analytic functions.

-- Toby 22:00 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

I thought about this "discrete math" thing some more. Our page Discrete mathematics includes set theory in its list of topics -- correctly in my opinion -- but that's not really enough. Your argument in the 0⁰ section is focused on the combinatorics of finite sets. I think that I wanted a generic term, rather than a long list of applicable fields -- but that's better at the beginning of the article than in the spot that I've changed. So let me switch them; let me know what you think about it now. -- Toby 00:00 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not very happy with the 0^0 discussion: I think we should start out with making it clear that always and everywhere and without exceptions, in algebra, set theory, discrete mathematics or analysis, 0^0 is defined to be 1. Formulas break down left and right if you don't. (The binomial theorem could be mentioned as another example.) Then, after we have hammered that into the readers' brains, and repeated it three times, we might mention on the side that u^v is not continuous and in certain cases both u and v approach 0 but u^v does not approach 1. This is not an argument against the definition 0^0=1; it's just a defect of the function u^v. AxelBoldt 23:49 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

I added a paragraph to that section that I'd been thinking about. I don't know if it'll make you perfectly happy. I don't want to simply come out and say that 0⁰ = 1, period, because (as mentioned in my paragraph) a more nuanced approach is possible. I'd even argue that many calculus textbooks are secretly adopting such an approach, although not very well. (But then, since when are calculus textbooks well written?) You can probably find old posts by me on sci.math about this; although I was younger and more naïve in those days, I still agree with my ultimate conclusion there. -- Toby 00:15 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

The new paragraph is fine. Can I convince you to switch the first and second paragraph of the 0^0 section? First give the numerous contexts where 0^0=1 is the only possible definition, and the reasons, and then give the single exception where one may treat it as indeterminate, and the reason. If you want to make me perfectly happy that is... AxelBoldt 02:52 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Toby, something else occurred to me the other day. If you want to call 0⁰ an "indeterminate form" on account of the discontinuity, then (-8)^1/3 should also be called an indeterminate form, for the same reason. AxelBoldt 03:37 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I don't see any discontinuity there. (-8)^x is not defined (as a real number) for x near 1/3, so we are (if we fix -8) talking about an isolated point, where any function is continuous. (And of course there's no discontinuity when varying the -8). OTOH, if we pick a branch of the complex natural logarithm, then exponentiation is perfectly continuous on a (complex) neighbourhood there. So whether we're considering real or complex numbers, there is no discontinuity. (Really this discussion is primarily about indeterminate forms, but we don't have an article to discuss that yet.) -- Toby 01:23 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

I write out "one" as three letters, when I write "one example of this phenomenon", but if I'm referring to the mathematical object that is the number 1, then I write the digit rather than the three-letter word. Does anyone have opinions about the propriety or felicitousness or usefulness or comprehensibility of this usage? Michael Hardy 03:10 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you're thinking. -- Toby 01:24 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

sounds fine to me. the rule that i follow is write the numbers in letters from one to ten, and everything else is written in numerals, except if it starts a sentence (although I'd probably break that rule if it was a large number, for some spur-of-the-moment definition of large). i agree that if you're talking math, then it makes more sense to write it in numerals. Dze27 03:24 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I found myself sticking "of" back in when I remembered that Michael is certain that this word is wrong ... so I just rewrote the phrases to avoid it! I hope that this keeps everybody happy? -- Toby Bartels 02:45, 13 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I noted that the "easy formula" sinned in dividing by zero. It might be something to delete since it doesn't really apply to this page anymore after one notices. --130.39.154.50 22:34, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I wrote that a certain probability distribution "concentrates probability 1 at 0". Someone changed it to "concentrates with probability 1 at 0", saying that that word was missing. That is not correct. This is not a random variable; to say it does something "with probability 1" therefore makes no sense. Rather, it is the probability distribution of a random variable. I meant that it concentrates all of the probability at 0. Michael Hardy 19:47, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Eequor's allegations of fallaciousness

On August 27th, Eequor deleted what in her summary she called a "fallacious argument", the thought-experiment of the calculator that only multiplies. I am appalled, and I put it back. A number of mathematicians have edited this page without complaining about that argument. I've also used it in teaching basic combinatorics in probability courses I've taught at several universities. One of those was MIT, where some of the student are exceedingly mentally acute, and no one complained. Could those concerned venture their opinions here? Michael Hardy 23:49, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The most glaring error is the idea that a calculator which can only multiply must necessarily continue to usefully function if its value is cleared. It may easily be claimed that, in fact, the calculator is functioning exactly as designed if 3 is entered after clear is pressed and 0 is the result. It is probably buggy, and will never again produce any number other than 0, but it does what you said it should do. No further conclusion can be drawn from this, anyway, because exactly two numbers are being multiplied every time, not zero numbers.

Another problem: the argument supposes that the displayed value must be identical to the value stored in memory. This may sometimes be true in real life, but it is not necessary. For example, calculators must often round fractional values so they will fit on the display, but many calculators continue to store the least significant digits. The imaginary calculator might display 0 while storing 1 internally.

Additionally, the argument is inconsistent with itself. It supposes a calculator which "can only multiply", and then adds that the calculator also has a clear function. There is also no definition of what clear might do. Because of this, the result of pressing the clear key after multiplying 21 by 4 is undefined, and so no conclusions about the future behavior can be made.

One could define the clear key to mean "remove the current number and display 1", but this leads to a circular argument, additionally neglecting to demonstrate why the result cannot be 0. Defining the key as replacing the previous value with 0 gives an apparent reductio ad absurdum, but not of a sort that makes any conclusion about the definition of the empty product (it only shows the clear key must not produce 0 if it is desired that the calculator will continue to function). The key must be defined to produce no numerical value. Call this value nil, and let the calculator display nothing at all if its value is nil.

As commonly understood, a calculator displaying nothing accepts the next-input value as its new value (entering 3 when the value is nil produces 3). Since the calculator is claimed to only multiply, and because the only value which when multiplied by a number n produces exactly n is the multiplicative identity, 1, nil must be numerically equivalent to 1.

Now, consider the behavior of the calculator immediately after pressing clear. It is blank, and will remain blank indefinitely until a number is entered, yet when a number is entered the blankness will be numerically equivalent to 1. No numbers are multiplied until enter is pressed. Therefore the empty product is equal to 1. --[[User:Eequor|η

υωρ]] 01:11, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I find the arguments above largely correct if construed literally, but completely lacking in merit, for reasons I would have thought were obvious. They're written by someone who is too literal-minded. Michael Hardy 19:56, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No, you're simply incorrect. You needn't be rude when you're shown to be wrong. If this is the quality of education provided by MIT, I consider myself fortunate to have not been a student there. --[[User:Eequor|η

υωρ]] 00:47, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I was not shown to be wrong. A somewhat hand-waving argument was given; you showed that there were holes in it if construed literally, but it's not-quite-literal meaning should have been clear. Another user has taken some trouble to rephrase it in view of your comments. What exactly is it you're calling rude? My statement that the fact that the meaning should have been obvious? Some people consider excessive literal-mindedness rude. Michael Hardy 01:46, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Ad hominem is inherently rude.

"Ronald Reagan is a Republican, therefore the argument he just gave is wrong." That's ad hominem. But I don't think it's inherently rude, although fallacious, nor that Ronald Reagan would be offended by being called a Republican. Michael Hardy 20:26, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Whether a person is "too literal-minded" is a matter of opinion.

OK, your removing a very good argument is literal-mindedness. OK? Michael Hardy 20:26, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

As written, your previous statement implies literal-mindedness should have been obvious, not the meaning of the thought experiment.

While its general meaning should be obvious to laypeople, and most people will probably accept it without question, the experiment has been presented poorly and makes its conclusion for the wrong reasons. This is an encyclopedia, not a grade school textbook. Articles should be made readable without sacrificing accuracy. Science does not accept arguments simply because they are "good enough", and neither should Wikipedia. --[[User:Eequor|η

υωρ]] 02:13, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Eequor, you are rude and gratuitously belligerent. I have been polite in addressing you and have tried consistently to reconcile, but you persist in belligerence. Michael Hardy 20:26, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Errr - I guess this is, at one further level of abstraction, about designing a finite state machine of a certain rather simple kind. So, that could be made more explicit. Not going to prove anything, one way or another. Charles Matthews 09:16, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Maybe it would be nice to move paragraphs about "literal mindedness" etc. to somewhere else, and retain here just the essential relevant remarks concerning the original subject:

The calculator could indeed display nothing after pushing "CLEAR" and work in all other ways as required.
All agree that if a numerical value has to be assigned to the/an empty product, it cannot be anything else than 1.
(I quote) "This is an encyclopedia, not a grade school textbook. Articles should be made readable without sacrificing accuracy." (I defend the same thesis, but it does not always appear to be common concensus...)
(quote cont'd) "Science does not accept arguments simply because" + "of the (...) exceedingly mentally acute (...) no one complained". (NB: this was gluing together 2 quotes...)

I think it is about the same discussion on whether '0' is a 'natural', i.e. 'counting' number: do we start counting at 1 or at 0 (before actually starting...)? I remember discussion on this somewhere else, but could not find it now. I don't think there can be a categorical "one and only true" answer. It's a convention about terminology, which does not matter as long as everybody agrees on the mathematical facts. The worst that can happen is some possible confusion about the meaning of words, which can in turn cause errors for those who cite/use theorems from others without checking the author's conventions on what the words do mean. The best to avoid this is to take care to mention explicitely known ambiguities everywhere they may be relevant (is O in N? does "ring" imply "unital"?, ...) — MFH: Talk 16:17, 20 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whether or not zero is a natural number is a matter of convention. It could be either way. The empty product must be 1.

Here is another justification, based on computer programming. Suppose you have an array of numbers x(1) ... x(10) and you want to get the sum of them and the product of them. You would do it this way (pseudocode, not WikiCode):

sum := 0

prod := 1

for i := 1 to 10 do

sum := sum + x(i)

prod := prod * x(i)

The empty sum is 0. The empty product is 1. Someone may want to write this up for the article. I don't want to because I don't want to take any heat. Bubba73 02:44, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's already in the article. It's the section titled A conceptual rationale. Michael Hardy 22:51, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The following program woud be indeniably better:

sum := x(1)

prod := x(1)

for i := 2 to 10 do

sum := sum + x(i)

prod := prod * x(i)

I maintain that this philosophical "problem" has its root in the question of counting: Do you start with the first member to count, or before counting the first member. — MFH: Talk 23:32, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

PS: indeed, depending on what are the objects to sum and multiply, O and 1 are not the same. E.g. a computer algebra program could give you an error if the x(i) were matrices and it would not allow the scalar 0 (resp 1) to be added to (resp multiplied by) a matrix. But I agree on the following:

The empty sum (resp. product) of objects in X should be the neutral element for addition (resp multiplication) in X.

Remains to know what is the neutral element for the (cartesian) product of sets. — MFH: Talk

Who ever said there's either a problem or a matter of philosophy? Your quotation marks around "problem" make it look as if someone other than you saw a problem here, or otherwise used that word. Michael Hardy 23:50, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

PS: "Indeniably"? Did you mean "undeniably"? Certainly your algorithm is NOT better, since it starts the sum at 1 rather than 0. Michael Hardy 23:50, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

0⁰ is indeterminate?

I once read somewhere that 0⁰ is indeterminate, because 0⁰ = 0^1-1 = 0¹/0¹ = 0/0 which is indeterminate. And the proof that n⁰ = 1 to which I'm most familiar is n⁰ = n^1-1 = n¹/n¹ = n/n = 1 which of course doesn't apply if n = 0. --Army1987 11:26, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The first argument is no good; the second one explains something. Charles Matthews 11:30, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The sense in which 0⁰ is indeterminate is that if f(x) and g(x) both approach 0 as x approaches something then f(x)^g(x) may approach any positive number, depending on what functions f and g are. But for many purposes, including both formal power series and convergent power series, and many of the purposes of combinatorics and probability, one should take 0⁰ to be 1. Michael Hardy 19:16, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

.... However, we should figure out what the best way is to address this point in the article. To be continued ... Michael Hardy 19:18, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think we should be bold (or: honest) enough to admit explicitely that this is a ~~pure~~ matter of convention. We can then motivate it by the numerous cases where it is "the only good thing to do", and maybe should once again be honest enough to list afterwards some of the extremely rare cases where it is not convenient, and where it could be justified (by convenience) to use another convention, say 0^0 = 0 (I can't think of any other.)

(In some sense, like 0×∞=0 in measure theory, but not in 1st year calculus on limits.) — MFH: Talk 18:40, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

But it is not just a matter of convention. I think the article makes that clear. But maybe we should also add examples of combinatorial identities and other formulas that rely on this fact, in order to solidify this point further. Michael Hardy 00:49, 17 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I delete "pure", but it's a matter of convention, and it can be useful in some situations to put "0⁰=0"; e.g. I had to consider spaces

N(r)=\{x\in \mathbb {C} ^{\mathbb {N} }\mid \lim |x_{n}|^{r_{n}}=0\}

where r are sequences decreasing to zero, and in this context it was useful to take the (exceptional) convention "0⁰=0". Of course, I agree with the standard definition, but it's nevertheless somehow like the cited convention in measure theory. — MFH: Talk 14:36, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In this discussion is worth noting that if y(x) is defined recursively as y=x^y then lim_x->0y(x) -> {0,1}. If an approximation of this limit is taken at an odd iteration it equals 0, and 1 for even iterations. This function is quite cool on its own merits, for example, it ceases to be multiply-valued on the interval [e^-e,1].

Thank you

Great article, Michael Hardy! I've always wondered why a number raised to the power of zero equals one, and my math teachers don't seem to know/get annoyed when I ask questions that I'm not required to ask to complete the homework assignment. By the way, what does the Wikipedia stress meter mean?

Cancelling numbers

About the cancelling numbers example: If both the numerator and denominator are divided by 6 there exists 1 in the numerator. I don't see a need for an empty set there. I'm definitely not trying to argue with the authors of this article but only telling the impression I got.

empty product of sets

I came to this page following the "see also" link on cartesian product, but I did not find much info on that on this page, more precisely, only the 1st phrase of the last section of the introduction:

More generally, given an operation of multiplication on some collection of objects,
the empty  product is the result of multiplying no objects together.
It is generally defined to be the identity element with respect to the given operation,
if such exists.

And I can't see what is the identity element for the cartesian product. Except if we're willing to think "modulo isomorphism", and then it is any singleton. E.g., { 0 }, but also, equivalently, { 12 + 5 X + 2005 X² } or anything else.

Now, this makes sense if we think of Rⁿ as n-dimensional vector space, but not if we see Rⁿ as mapping of n (= {0,...,n-1}, 0={}, see natural number) into R.

At least, until a mapping of empty domain could be identified with a singleton... which, admittedly, would be a possibility (would be somehow coherent with identification of a nullary function with a constant (but, in fact, any constant)) but for some reason, I would have identified such a function rather with the empty set, in view of the cardinality of its graph. (This issue should be discussed in function.)

So: R^{} = {0} or R^{} = {} ? — MFH: Talk 18:27, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

(Remark added) - in view of {0}=1 (see natural number), maybe R^{} = {0} = 1 would indeed be a good convention (empty product equal to 1) - "How neatless it all fits together", in Snoopy's words. — MFH: Talk 14:01, 20 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

associativity of Cartesian product

In the section "Complex numbers", it is written

although the associativity of Cartesian product is nowhere stated.

I think associativity isn't really used here (and there are other flaws in this paragraph, as the logic implies that the imaginary line {0}×R would also be "equal" to R), but on the contrary, by definition the Cartesian product (of two sets, i.e. seen as binary operator) is the set of (ordered) couples (a,b), defined e.g. by (a,b)={a,{a,b}} and it is immediate to check that (A×B)×C is NOT equal to A×(B×C); even if A=B=C, they are completely different sets (and both are sets of 2-tuples). — MFH: Talk 18:58, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]