Bizzare division bug. Take a look! (Am I missing something obvious here?)

Questions
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1

Hi everyone.

When I enter 0.1/10000, Mathematica Online spits out the correct answer of 0.00001.

But if I instead enter 0.01/10000, it gives the nonsensical answer of 1.x10.

Try it out with similar numbers and you’ll see the same thing!

Is this a bug? Am I really silly and missing something obvious? What do you folks think?

2

Hi,

I am on OS X 10.10.1 and Mathematica 10.0.2 and cannot reproduce the problem. I get:

noreproduce.png

Cheers,
M.

3

Sorry if I wasn’t specific. This is happening in the cloud version of Mathematica, not the desktop version (if the desktop version had this bug, I’d be frightened).

However, the fact that it works perfectly on the desktop version makes me think this must be a cloud bug. Can anyone else reproduce it?

4

In[11]:= $Version

Out[11]= "10.0 for Microsoft Windows (64-bit) (December 4, 2014)"

In[12]:= 0.01/10000

Out[12]= 1.*10^-6
5

Dear Ted,

ok reproduced in the Wolfram Cloud and Mathematica online. Note, that this appears to be a typesetting issue. If you multiply by say 100. it gives the right result.

Cheers,
M.

6

I just noticed that in the cloud you get the right output if you use:

NumberForm[0.01/10000.]

Cheers,
M.

7

Sorry guys – I didn’t notice “Online.”

8

I reported it to the cloud folks.

I suspect Marco is right - much more likely to be a typesetting issue than a can’t-do-math issue.

9

Ah, buggy typesetting makes a lot of sense. I think I was especially confused because every function that used it as an input were also typeset incorrectly. Thanks everyone!