The Sky Before Dawn

This is probably a question I should have thrown out to the world before this point but such is life.

What are the real numbers that are their own reciprocals? There is probably a way to put this but isn’t it only 1? Equivalents of 1 like 99/99 would also be their own reciprocals, but indeed those numbers are just 1 in the first place. I think I’ve made this question into more than it is supposed to be, the answer has to be “1”, maybe “1 and its equivalents”.

[edit: Allegedly -1 is also its own reciprocal but COME ON! Actually I’m not sure about that 1/1 * 1/1 is certainly still 1 no matter which 1 is supposed to be the original 1. But -1/1 * 1/-1 should also be positive 1 just like any other number and its reciprocal. I think the person saying that was getting ahead of themselves and thinking of how one line is perpendicular to another line when they have slopes that are opposite reciprocals such that the product of the two slopes would be -1.]

For those who don’t know or remember, a reciprocal is a the number that you can multiply another number by to get 1. This is mostly (only?) relevent for dealing with fractions (rational numbers). So for example the reciprocal of 99 is 1/99, 1/99(99/1)=1.

[further edit: Anybody who knows shit or doesn’t know shit can feel free to chime in here. I have to assume that people who get here from searches are looking for the answer to the question for a class just like I was, and so your teacher certainly said something about your assignment just like mine did (the -1 thing, which I still think is wrong) so leave comments about that if they either agreed or disagreed with me.]

Yes I really hate this type of stupid math. I will also be pissed if 1is considered the right answer when I give it, but that there is some other something in higher levels of math that is like “well blah blah”. Of course if you specifiy “real numbers” that implies that in other sets of numbers (imaginary maybe?) there might be different solutions. That is like a piece of pain.

I had to save this as a draft and by the time I got back to it this post became meaningless but I bothered to write it so here it is, feel free to comment, answer, speculate, or break down crying as you please anyway. Nothing can be more absurd than existence itself after all.

I somewhat forgot that months ago I started an entry that broke down the various series that are used in the myriad Super Robot Wars games, mostly just what my impressions of the original work were but also my impressions of the series in the game are. So I might say that I thought the Dunbine anime, at the time, was interesting and has since been emulated, and also that Dunbine units have run the spectrum from being totally useless to totally great in the games and have not been seen recently. I think they were in Compact 3 but don’t hold me to that, I know they were in Impact which was a modified Compact 2. And they suck in Impact. They suck hard. Anyway it occurs to me that as I’ve been hurting for posts lately I could cannibalize and expand that to cover only one series an entry. We’ll see how motivated I am to do that after sitting on the post for 5 months without further action.

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