Talk:0.999...

Yet another anon
Moved to Arguments subpage

efn?
Right now, we have footnotes that are references and footnotes that are explanatory notes or asides, the former using and tags, the latter using tags. I propose wrapping the second kind in instead, which has what I consider the advantage of distinguishing between the two types of notes (efn get labeled [a], [b], etc. instead of [1], [2]). One disadvantage is that there are clearly some judgement calls to be made. How do other people feel about this? (Obviously this is not urgent, am happy to have "I'm busy trying to preserve featured status and don't want to think about/deal with this" as an answer.) --JBL (talk) 21:54, 17 April 2024 (UTC)


 * I'd be fine with that. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 22:15, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Fine with me. Hawkeye7   (discuss)  22:29, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Strongly support using efn. --Trovatore (talk) 22:35, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
 * OK, I've made a stab at dividing them up. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 23:31, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I think it's fine to add efn. Additionally, maybe both the notes and references sections should be merged into one section, containing three different lists (notes, footnotes, works cited)? Dedhert.Jr (talk) 04:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I assume that your goal is to eliminate footnotes that are in fact citations? For example,
 * These could be just ref tags with rp templates for page numbers and quotes, but I don't know if that is the style you want. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:11, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Gah, no. rp tags are ugly enough when used in isolation. Stacking three in a row and then trying to fit in a quote as well would be a mess. We handled the concerns in this section back in April; nothing more in this regard needs to be done. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 21:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Gah, no. rp tags are ugly enough when used in isolation. Stacking three in a row and then trying to fit in a quote as well would be a mess. We handled the concerns in this section back in April; nothing more in this regard needs to be done. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 21:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

lede that gets to the point without jargon.
I realize the mathematicians love precision and thus those special words that have meaning in math, but this article has an important point for a broader audience. I change the intro yesterday to concentrate the ideas that "It is the number one!" into the first paragraph and move the two (or is it three or maybe one) definitions to a separate section. The waffle-worded, footnoted definition will be completely opaque to naive readers. They will stop reading and never discover "This number is equal to 1.". Unfortunately my change was reverted by @Tito Omburo with an edit summary, "Restored old lede. It is important that the lede refer to an actual number, not merely some notation.", which I do not understand. Note that my lede was In my opinion we should change the content back towards the version I suggested. Johnjbarton (talk) 14:51, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * In mathematics, 0.999... (also written as 0.$\overline{9}$, 0.$. 9$ or 0.(9)) is a notation for the number "1" represented as a repeating decimal consisting of an unending sequence of 9s after the decimal point.
 * It's misleading to say that "0.999..." is notation referring to the number 1. The notation refers to a real number, namely the least real number greater than every truncation of the decimal. The fact is that this real number is equal to one. Tito Omburo (talk) 14:58, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Ok so how about
 * In mathematics, 0.999... (also written as 0.$\overline{9}$, 0.$. 9$ or 0.(9)) is a notation a real number equal to "1". The real number is represented as a repeating decimal consisting of an unending sequence of 9s after the decimal point.
 * and restoring the Definition section? Johnjbarton (talk) 15:09, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This still boils the subject of the article down to a tautology, which it is not. 0.999... definitionally means something. It is not the same thing as the numeral 1. Tito Omburo (talk) 15:26, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry I mis-edited. I know you disagreed with "notation" as it means definitional equivalence, but I accidentally left the word. Here is the alternative I should have written:
 * In mathematics, 0.999... (also written as 0.$\overline{9}$, 0.$. 9$ or 0.(9)) is a real number equal to "1". The real number is represented as a repeating decimal consisting of an unending sequence of 9s after the decimal point.
 * Johnjbarton (talk) 15:52, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Agree that the simpler get-to-the-point jargon-free lede is better. The intended audience here is not mathematicians, it's lay people who likely are not familiar with the idea that the decimal representation of a real number is not unique in all cases (ie a "terminating" decimal that repeats zeros always has another representation that repeats nines).
 * In particular, it's too early in the article to assume that the reader knows anything about infinite sequences and convergence. Statement like "The notation refers to a real number, namely the least real number greater than every truncation of the decimal." will be lost on the average reader.
 * Similarly, it's not appropriate to assume that the reader knows the difference between a numeral and a number. We can explain all this later in the article.
 * Agree with removing the technical details to a definition section. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 15:31, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The problem is this is like telling lies to children. An unprepared reader has no idea what the notation 0.999... refers to. The current lede makes clear what that is. The proposed lede is actively misleading, in the name of being more accessible. The problem is that the subject of this article is not accessible to someone unwilling to grasp in some way with the concept of infinity. But this important aspect cannot be written out of the intro. Tito Omburo (talk) 15:39, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * @Tito Omburo I gather your primary concern is the lede. My primary concern is the definition sentences. I think we should move that out of the intro.
 * I agree that the concept of infinity is core to the article. How about a sentence in the first paragraph that explicitly calls out the concept of infinity? Johnjbarton (talk) 15:59, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * One thing to consider is that opening sentences don't always have to have the form "foo is a bar"; when that's awkward, it's fine to pick a different structure. In this case, maybe something along the lines of
 * In mathematics, the notation 0.999..., with the digit 9 repeating endlessly, represents exactly the number 1.
 * just as the first sentence, then we can continue on with elaborations. This way we can (as Johnjbarton put it) "get to the point" in the first sentence, and we haven't told any lies-to-children.  By not insisting on including the phrase, we
 * don't have to say that it "is a notation"; we just put that part before the 0.999...
 * don't have to say that it's a notation for a different (infinitely long) notation, which is true if you're super literal-minded, but is extremely confusing in the first sentence, and
 * don't have to talk about least upper bounds before we give the punch line
 * I think this small tweak could open up a lot of possibilities for making the opening sentence (at least) more understandable to non-mathematicians, without saying anything false. --Trovatore (talk) 16:13, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I support this change. Tito Omburo (talk) 16:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Also support this change. Mr. Swordfish (talk) 16:22, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Great, I made that change. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:35, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I reverted the change by @D.Lazard but I think it may have some things that are helpful. Unfortunately the comment by D.Lazard was added but not signed nor set as a Reply. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:41, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I didn't like the new version as a whole. Tito Omburo (talk) 17:44, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Independently from Trovatore's post, I have rewritten the lead for removing jargon (in particular "denotes" is less jargonny/pedantic than "is a notation for") and unneeded technicalities from the beginning. This required a complete restructuration. By the way, I have removed some editorial considerations that do not belong here. By doing this, I deleted the last Johnjbarton's edit, but I think that my version is better for the intended audience. — Preceding unsigned comment added by D.Lazard (talk • contribs) 19:23, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry to have forgotten to sign. I did not use the "reply" button, because this is an answer to the opening post, and, as such, should not be indented.
 * I rewrote the first paragraph of the lead that used many terms (technical or jargon) that are useless for people that know infinite decimals and are confusing for others. Also, I added that the equality can be proved, and therefore that is is not a convention that may be rejected by people who do not like it. D.Lazard (talk) 10:37, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Looks fine to me. Tito Omburo (talk) 10:41, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Glad to see the work done to make this article more readable to a general audience. I hope "The utilitarian preference for the terminating decimal representation..." (last para of lede) can also be simplified, as I see what it means but as written it's well above most of the population's reading level. I'm confused by the use of the     template before the 1 in the first paragraph: it looks like a formatting error. What's the point of that big space? MartinPoulter (talk) 11:34, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I have removed this sentence per WP:NPOV: authors in mathematical education have different explanation on the difficulties of the students with the equality; this is not to Wikipedia to select one amongst several. I did several other edits that are explained in the edit summaries. D.Lazard (talk) 14:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Sourcing question
Does the argument in 0.999... come from somewhere? Other than that, the sourcing seems OK. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 05:10, 29 June 2024 (UTC)


 * The first and the second, as well as the bullet list, remain unsourced. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 06:18, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I have provisionally trimmed the passage I couldn't find support for. It wasn't technically wrong, as far as I could tell, but we aren't a repository for everything that could be said about a math topic. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 17:47, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Probably a correct removal, but sort of a pity, since it's the only bit of actual mathematical interest.
 * No matter. This isn't really a math article, or shouldn't be.  Mathematicians are unlikely to care about 0.999... per se.  We should keep that in mind when thinking about how to present the material.  I'm totally against lies to children, but I also don't see the point in making this an article about real analysis.  If you understand real analysis you don't need this article. --Trovatore (talk) 21:50, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Two representations in every positional numeral system with one terminating?
The article contains the statement
 * ... every nonzero terminating decimal has two equal representations ... all positional numeral systems have this property.

Every positional numeral system has two representations for certain numbers, but is this necessarily true of terminating representations? A counterexample would seem to be balanced ternary: the numbers that have two representations seem to be nonterminating, e.g. 1 = 1.000...bal3 has no other representation, but 1/2 = 0.111...bal3 = 1.TTT...bal3 (where T = &minus;1) has two. Or maybe I need some coffee? —Quondum 01:56, 30 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Well, the trouble is that "balanced ternary" is not a "usual" positional numeral system. Perhaps it might be better to write, "and this is true of all bases, not just decimal". In the end it depends whether you think Wikipedia is here for the benefit of lawyers, or just to help people understand things. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:07, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * A better viewpoint is that such systems have no "terminating" representations at all, but only ones that eventually repeat the digit 0. That's beyond the scope of this article.  Still, I think we should de-emphasize the notion of "terminating" representations.  We don't really need to talk about them.  We can say, for example, that 3.4999... is the same as 3.5000.... --Trovatore (talk) 05:36, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * While I agree that "terminating representations" are a little peripheral, including that to answer the immediate question "How easy is it to find such values?" seems reasonable, although extrapolating from the example would seem obvious to us, and the phrase is adequately defined as linked. I don't feel strongly about keeping "terminating representations" or any other specific description of the class, though.  I have clarified the statement in a way that fits the section .
 * That aside, it is interesting that having multiple representations depends on the definition of a positional numeral system as having position weights and values associated with symbols that do not depend on the value of other digits; I say this, because Gray codes are remarkably close to being a positional system and (extended to a fractional part) they evidently have a unique representation for each real number. —Quondum 15:11, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Not sure quite what you mean about the Gray codes. The key point here is that representations of this sort are zero-dimensional in the product topology, which seems to be the natural one to put on them, whereas the reals are one-dimensional.  So a continuous surjection from the representations to the real numbers cannot be an injection with a continuous inverse, because otherwise it would be a homeomorphism, contradicting the previous observation about dimension.  Therefore there must be reals with non-unique representations.
 * Maybe the representation by Gray codes you're talking about isn't continuous (or its inverse is not); would need to see what you mean. --Trovatore (talk) 18:30, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I intended that a digit incrementing reverses the interpretation of all subsequent digits – in my quest to get rid of the infinite number of digits 'rolling over' (e.g. 0.999... to 1.000...). Looking more closely, I see that my supposition was incorrect: you still get two representations for a (presumably the same) set of real values, but now a pair of equal representations differs in one digit instead of infinitely many. This leads me to wonder whether a representation composed of an infinite sequence of discrete symbols could avoid doubles, once we have the the restriction that every real number must have a representation. —Quondum 19:12, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * If you put no restrictions at all on what you mean by a "representation", the answer is clearly yes, you can avoid duplicates. For example the set of all countably infinite decimal strings and the set of all reals have the same cardinality, so there's a bijection between them.  You can even make that bijection pretty explicit, by playing games with (the proof of) the Schröder–Bernstein theorem.
 * However, if you care at all about continuity, you're going to need to deal with the dimension issue I mentioned in my previous comment. --Trovatore (talk) 19:52, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I was having difficulty framing the issue properly, and I thought about the cardinality argument after my post. I this context, all I would care about in this context is finding a simple constructive definition of a class of surjective maps from sequences of symbols to the reals for which multiple representations occur, ideally independent of the axiom of choice and it would be nice if it gave a sense of the lengths one might have to go to to avoid these multiples. The class of standard positional systems suffices, but clearly the class for which this is true is larger, and this gives room for possibly finding a class that is simpler to define.  Improving on just copying the second sentence in Positional notation seems to me to be challenge.  —Quondum 21:40, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * In this context, a nice way to think of continuity is that, if you want finitely much information about the answer, you need only finitely much information about the input. On the "real" side, finitely much information means an open interval.  On the "representation" side, it means finitely many digits.  If that's true in both directions, then there must be duplicates.
 * I'm a little skeptical that this can (or should) be worked into this article, but it would be satisfying if it could be. --Trovatore (talk) 22:13, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm not of the opinion that anything more complicated than a sentence defining 'positional numeral system' is called for here to address the concerns that have been expressed, and it seems that my hope that a broader class could be defined more easily was too much. I have to confess that I do not know what you mean by 'finitely many digits': we are dealing with a countably infinite sequence of digits, each of which is an element of a finite (or possibly infinite) set of symbols.  I'm afraid educating me on this is, for the moment, a lost cause, so I suggest that we just focus on language to include in the article.  —Quondum 23:35, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I tend to agree that this is getting off-scope for the talk page. I'll drop a note on your talk page.  I don't think it's a lost cause; I probably just haven't found the right way of explaining myself.
 * But as long as we're here, I do want to correct the record for the benefit of any lurkers. Turns out my maunderings about the continuity of the inverse mapping were unnecessary.  As long as
 * The alphabet is finite (or at least there are only finitely many choices for a digit at any given position),
 * The mapping is continuous, and
 * The mapping is injective
 * you get continuity of the inverse mapping, and therefore a contradiction, for free. That's because the representation space is compact (by Tychonoff's theorem), so any closed set is compact.  Then the continuous image of a closed set is compact and therefore closed, which in the injective case implies that the inverse map is continuous.
 * So if we can source it, we could say that any continuous interpretation of the representations would have to have duplicates. Is that appropriate for this article?  I doubt it.  This article ought to be pitched considerably lower.  Anyone who understands the above argument isn't looking to understand 0.999.... --Trovatore (talk) 03:06, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Very nice. This also in some sense explains how p-adic integers can have unique expansions: the p-adic integers are compact.  Tito Omburo (talk) 10:59, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Or more importantly, the p-adic integers are zero-dimensional, or it might be easier to think of it in terms of the p-adic integers are totally disconnected (not quite equivalent but it gets at the same point for our purposes).
 * The representations are totally disconnected whereas the reals are connected, so intuitively, to map the representations to the reals, you have to "connect something", which is where the duplicates come from. The p-adics are already totally disconnected, so the problem doesn't come up. --Trovatore (talk) 20:05, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Also, the product space $$\{0,...,9\}^{\mathbb N}$$ is totally disconnected, and so is not the continuous image of a real interval. Tito Omburo (talk) 23:16, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * As user:Imaginatorium point out, the statement is valid in usual positional numeral systems, but not in all non-standard positional numeral systems. Luckily, positional numeral systems redirects to a section of List of numeral systems on "Standard positional numeral systems", so I suggest we simply use that wikilink. Nø (talk) 15:32, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * We should never have a redirect and its plural linking to different places, so that is not a solution. —Quondum 15:54, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I have changed that redirect to be consistent with the singular form, after verifying that there are no mainspace uses. In any event, the definition at Positional notation (essentially a weighted sum) is precisely correct for the statement as it now stands (i.e. including all nonstandard positional systems that meet this definition, with the proviso that they can represent all real numbers), and as supported by the text of the article.  —Quondum 16:43, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

As far as I understand, this section discusses supposed properties of. But this supposes a precise definition of a positional numeral system, and of a positional numeral system that accepts infinite strings. Without such a definition, everything is original research.

As an example, the standard $p$-adic representation of $p$-adic numbers is an example of a positional numeral system such that there is always a unique representation.

By the way it is astonishing that nobody mention what is, in my opinion, the main reason for which there is so much confusion with the subject of the article: it is that "infinite decimals" make a systematic use of actual infinity, a concept that is so counterintuitive that, before the 20th century, it was refused by most mathematicians. It seems that some teachers hope that kids could understand easily concept that were refused by mathematicians and philosophers a century ago. D.Lazard (talk) 16:44, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I think you're a bit off on that point, Prof. Lazard. My impression is that the rejection of the actual infinite was more in theory than in practice, and its systematic use considerably predated the 20th century, since real analysis was developing in the mid-19th century and used the actual infinite implicitly.  It took Cantor to make it explicit, but the ideas of Bolzano and Cauchy and Weierstrass and Dedekind were already laying the groundwork.
 * That said, sure, it's a key psychological point.
 * ObSMBC. --Trovatore (talk) 18:53, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This is interesting, but does it apply? As I understand it (and admittedly this is outside my area of knowledge), p-adic numbers do not embed the reals.  The ability to represent all reals is core to the statement that there are necessarily multiple representations.  —Quondum 16:57, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Interesting point about p-adic numbers. I think the lead should mention infinity somewhere. I think the issues are resolved if the article is clear on what a "positional number system" is. I am unclear exactly what is meant. Tito Omburo (talk) 17:01, 30 June 2024 (UTC)


 * So we have two people saying that a clear definition of a 'positional number system' is needed in the article, and I tend to agree in the context of this claim. I imagine that this can be omitted from the lead, but it might make sense in .  —Quondum 18:09, 30 June 2024 (UTC)