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by scarmig 572 days ago
Floats don't have multiplicative inverses, and the floating point operations don't give us any of the mathematical structures we expect of numbers. Floating point division already abandons algebra for the sake of usefulness.
1 comments

Knuth vol 2 has a nice discussion of floating point operations and shows how to reason about them. Wilkinson's classic "Rounding Errors in Algebraic Processes" (1966) also has a good discussion.