723
near zero
(mander.xyz)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
You probably are familiar with the thing, just not under that name, and not as a subject of mathematical study. I am aware that there are, at least in theory, mathematicians never expanding beyond pen+paper (and that's fine) but TBH they're getting kinda rare. The last time you fired up Julia you probably used them, R, possibly, Coq, it'd actually be a surprise.
They're most widely known to trip up newbie programmers, causing excessive bug hunts and then a proud bug report stating "0.1 + 0.2 /= 0.3, that's wrong", to which the reply will be "nope, that's exactly as the spec says". The solution, to people who aren't numerologists, is to sprinkle gratuitous amounts of epsilons everywhere.