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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]
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.
For the multiplicative inverse of a real number, divide 1 by the number. For example, the reciprocal of 5 is one fifth (1/5 or 0.2), and the reciprocal of 0.25 is 1 divided by 0.25, or 4. The reciprocal function, the function f(x) that maps x to 1/x, is one of the simplest examples of a function which is its own inverse (an involution).
For example, there are six divisors of 4; they are 1, 2, 4, −1, −2, and −4, but only the positive ones (1, 2, and 4) would usually be mentioned. 1 and −1 divide (are divisors of) every integer. Every integer (and its negation) is a divisor of itself. Integers divisible by 2 are called even, and integers not divisible by 2 are called odd ...
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.
These names reflect a basic concept in number theory, the 2-order of an integer: how many times the integer can be divided by 2. Specifically, the 2-order of a nonzero integer n is the maximum integer value k such that n/2 k is an integer. This is equivalent to the multiplicity of 2 in the prime factorization.
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For example, 7 divided by 2 is 3 with a remainder of 1. These difficulties are avoided by rational number arithmetic, which allows for the exact representation of fractions. [75] A simple method to calculate exponentiation is by repeated multiplication.