Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
James A. D. W. Anderson
Summary
James Arthur Dean Wallace Anderson, known as James Anderson, is a retired member of academic staff in the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading, England, where he used to teach compilers, algorithms, fundamentals of computer science and computer algebra, programming and computer graphics.
Anderson quickly gained publicity in December 2006 in the United Kingdom when the regional BBC South Today reported his claim of "having solved a 1200 year old problem", namely that of division by zero. However, commentators quickly responded that his ideas are just a variation of the standard IEEE 754 concept of NaN (Not a Number), which has been commonly employed on computers in floating point arithmetic for many years.
Dr Anderson defended against the criticism of his claims on BBC Berkshire on 12 December 2006, saying, "If anyone doubts me I can hit them over the head with a computer that does it."
Anderson was a member of the British Computer Society, the British Machine Vision Association, Eurographics, and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. He was also a teacher in the Computer Science department (School of Systems Engineering) at the University of Reading. He was
a psychology graduate who worked in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering departments at the University of Sussex and Plymouth Polytechnic (now the University of Plymouth). His doctorate is from the University of Reading for (in Anderson's words) "developing a canonical description of the perspective transformations in whole numbered dimensions".
He has written multiple papers on division by zero and has invented what he calls the "Perspex machine".
Anderson claims that "mathematical arithmetic is sociologically invalid" and that IEEE floating-point arithmetic, with NaN, is also faulty.
Anderson's transreal numbers were first mentioned in a 1997 publication, and made well known on the Internet in 2006, but not accepted as useful by the mathematics community. These numbers are used in his concept of transreal arithmetic and the Perspex machine.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.