But look, thats a crusial point… …have i also to import School math to dynamo… or write i my own calculator in dynamo?
regular calculators show an “Error”.
I have this take in mind for other calculations, within dynamo…
Are standard calculators accurate though?
A lot of calculators will return an error if you ask for the factorial of 2000 (2000!), for example the windows calculator, or the calculator on the iPad which I am typing this from. Meanwhile Google will tell you that the value is “infinity” which is a lie as the value is no where close to infinity. The actual value (as far as I can tell) is 3*10^499th power. That’s 3 with nearly 500 zeroes after it… Not even approaching infinity, and certainly not “error”.
This Quora answer does a good job summing it up, but you an imagine taking a value (say 5) and dividing it by a number (say 100), and then dividing the divisor by 10 and repeating the process.
5/100 = 0.05
5/10 = 0.5
5/1 = 5
5/0.1 = 50
5/0.01 = 500
5/0.001 = 5000
5/0.0001 - 50000
….
It would take you infinity to get to 5/0, but when you did the number would be… infinity. Or negative infinity, as things start to get circular, or rather spherical (because math is weird when you can’t do the odd stuff anymore). The problem is at this point our tools for extreme precision break down - that calculator is only as good at getting results as the chips can go - they can’t do the ‘imagine’ exercise your brain can on the example above. And therefore our tools sometimes return “error”, and sometimes lie (ie: representing infinity when we haven’t reached that value yet).
In an unsurprising coincidence that idea of infinity and negative infinity being the same starts to e somewhat useful when looking at mapping data onto a sphere - something we likely want Dynamo to be able to do well (UV mapping a sphere).