Bertilson's First Law of Numeric Inaccuracy

Ok. I've wondered about this for a long time, and I decided to figure it out. Now I'm publishing it so I can get into some legal battle with some loony lab scientist who believes he figured it out first.

The problem came to me several times with the last few weeks during Geometry. In my home schooled way, I'm supposed to do a set number of problems from a certain unnamed Geometry book. The notations are much like this:

1-16, 19-24

The problem I saw was that, in some situations, the last number did, in fact, equal the total number of pages...oh, never mind, I'll just confuse you with the formula thingy I made up.


Let X equal smaller number
Let Y equal larger number
Let R equal the real number (of pages, counted objects or things)

X - Y (pp.)

(Y-X) + 1 = R iff X = 1

(iff being a notation meaning "if and only if")

By these means, I mean to make it harder to explain once I put the thing in words.

1-8 is eight pages.
7-15 is eight pages. (for the sake of simplicity, I've changed this from the original thing...)

See? When you subtract one from eight, you get seven. In that case, the real number of counted things is eight. Fifteen minus seven equals eight. This is correct, somehow assisted or brought about by the fact that the smaller number is not one.

You thought zero was weird?

Now I can regret this for the rest of my life, as I already deplore the amount geometry people have confused me over the last few weeks. Have a nice day!


!Noah!