Verizon Math Dept

By way of Christoblog, I found my way ultimately to George Vaccaro's astonishing experience with a building full of Verizon customer service representatives who kept insisting to him that 0.002 dollars is the same thing as 0.002 cents.

If you want to save time -- it's twenty-seven minutes of hilarity but we don't all have twenty-seven minutes lying around the house -- you can go to The Consumerist, which has a transcript.

And back at Christoblog, we have what caught my attention in the first place:



Bonus points to the first geek who figures out how much the check is actually for.
Expand the post forthe answer.

And the answer is:

$0.002, two-tenths of a penny. (It's pretty easy to figure out that if you add 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + 1/64..., etc., you can get as close to 1 as you want to if you just go far enough, which makes the limit 1. But unless you have gotten reasonably far in calculus you're not going to know perhaps the most fascinating of all mathematical coincidences: the fact that if you take e (the base of natural logarithms) and raise it to power of pi (the most important constant in trigonometry) times i (the square root of negative one, which is at the heart of complex numbers), you get -1. So, 0.002 - 1 + 1 = 0.002.)

This has been your geek-out moment of the day. You may now return to normal life.