Floor/ceiling Functions and Fractional Part
Square brackets, as in = 3, are sometimes used to denote the floor function, which rounds a real number down to the next integer. However the floor and ceiling functions are usually typeset with left and right square brackets where the upper (for floor function) or lower (for ceiling function) horizontal bars are missing, as in or .
Curly brackets, as in {π} < 1/7, may denote the fractional part of a real number.
Read more about this topic: Bracket (mathematics)
Famous quotes containing the words floor, ceiling, functions, fractional and/or part:
“Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior—bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper—it’s possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother’s impending visit.”
—Mary Arrigo (20th century)
“What made the ceiling waterproof?
Landor’s tarpaulin on the roof.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“Hummingbird
stay for a fractional sharp
sweetness, and’s gone, can’t take
more than that.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Perhaps having built a barricade when you’re sixteen provides you with a sort of safety rail. If you’ve once taken part in building one, even inadvertently, doesn’t its usually latent image reappear like a warning signal whenever you’re tempted to join the police, or support any manifestation of Law and Order?”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)