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:
“The distant box is open. A sound of grain
Poured over the floor in some eagerness we
Rise with the night let out of the box of wind.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Hummingbird
stay for a fractional sharp
sweetness, and’s gone, can’t take
more than that.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)