I have to update you on our "dividing by zero" story, told on the BBC here and on Dayorama here.

Since last night, the world has gone crazy. We've had over four hundred comments on the BBC page and doubtless thousands of visitors (we've yet to see the stats), most of whom have probably come from Slashdot, the major science/technology site which somehow picked up on the story late yesterday.

Overwhelmingly, commenters to Slashdot and the BBC think Dr Anderson's theory of 'nullity' is, well, null and void. The main arguments seem to be either that it's just a mathematical device that anybody could have come up with which solves nothing, or it's fundamentally flawed in the proof and won't work anyway.

I'm working hard to get hold of Dr Anderson to put all these questions and get a response - it's great to be encouraging a proper mathematical debate! Of all the articles I thought might grab some attention and foster a good discussion, I'd never have thought to put money on a video purporting to show a new means of dividing by zero. It's brilliant.

Dr Anderson, to his immense credit, has already written a robust defence of his theory into our comments system. The bad news is, the comments system will only take so many thousand characters and, as you can imagine, a robust defence of division by zero needs more than a few thousand characters! So, quite hilariously, the good prof's argument is cut short in its prime, just when he's about to get to his proof.

The conspiracy theorists will be out to get us if we leave it that way for long, so early next week I'm hoping to track the doc down for some serious mathematical meditation. Until then our expert commenters will have to remain, er, divided...