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:
“Cats walk the floor at midnight; that enemy of fog,
The moon, wraps the bedpost in receding stillness....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“What made the ceiling waterproof?
Landor’s tarpaulin on the roof.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Adolescents, for all their self-involvement, are emerging from the self-centeredness of childhood. Their perception of other people has more depth. They are better equipped at appreciating others’ reasons for action, or the basis of others’ emotions. But this maturity functions in a piecemeal fashion. They show more understanding of their friends, but not of their teachers.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“Hummingbird
stay for a fractional sharp
sweetness, and’s gone, can’t take
more than that.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)