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An orange that has been sliced into two halves. In mathematics, division by two or halving has also been called mediation or dimidiation. [1] The treatment of this as a different operation from multiplication and division by other numbers goes back to the ancient Egyptians, whose multiplication algorithm used division by two as one of its fundamental steps. [2]
Long division is the standard algorithm used for pen-and-paper division of multi-digit numbers expressed in decimal notation. It shifts gradually from the left to the right end of the dividend, subtracting the largest possible multiple of the divisor (at the digit level) at each stage; the multiples then become the digits of the quotient, and the final difference is then the remainder.
17 indivisible camels. The 17-animal inheritance puzzle is a mathematical puzzle involving unequal but fair allocation of indivisible goods, usually stated in terms of inheritance of a number of large animals (17 camels, 17 horses, 17 elephants, etc.) which must be divided in some stated proportion among a number of beneficiaries.
For example, 20 apples divide into five groups of four apples, meaning that "twenty divided by five is equal to four". This is denoted as 20 / 5 = 4, or 20 / 5 = 4. [2] In the example, 20 is the dividend, 5 is the divisor, and 4 is the quotient.
Unit fractions can also be expressed using negative exponents, as in 2 −1, which represents 1/2, and 2 −2, which represents 1/(2 2) or 1/4. A dyadic fraction is a common fraction in which the denominator is a power of two, e.g. 1 / 8 = 1 / 2 3 . In Unicode, precomposed fraction characters are in the Number Forms block.
The first number to be divided by the divisor (4) is the partial dividend (9). One writes the integer part of the result (2) above the division bar over the leftmost digit of the dividend, and one writes the remainder (1) as a small digit above and to the right of the partial dividend (9).
Zero divided by a negative or positive number is either zero or is expressed as a fraction with zero as numerator and the finite quantity as denominator. Zero divided by zero is zero. In 830, Mahāvīra unsuccessfully tried to correct the mistake Brahmagupta made in his book Ganita Sara Samgraha : "A number remains unchanged when divided by zero."
In arithmetic, long division is a standard division algorithm suitable for dividing multi-digit Hindu-Arabic numerals (positional notation) that is simple enough to perform by hand.