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)
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hummingbird
stay for a fractional sharp
sweetness, and’s gone, can’t take
more than that.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“It is with benefits as with injuries in this respect, that we do not so much weigh the accidental good or evil they do us, as that which they were designed to do us.—That is, we consider no part of them so much as their intention.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)