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This questions asks how to write 0 in unary and the answer given was (literally) as nothing (with no symbol). I'm wondering how you would write a decimal (0.1 for example) in unary. Since 1^(-n) = 1, I presume it's impossible, $$.x = x,$$ $$.xx = xx$$ and so on. Is there a way to write numbers with decimal places in unary?

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  • The comments and answers in that other thread apply to your question too... in particular the comments like "For it to be used properly as a mathematical tool you end up needing to hack it a bit adding some other symbols. At that point you can just use something else that can represent your problem on a more practical way." and "If you have a definition, use it; if not, make it up." – JMoravitz Jul 23 '20 at 18:59
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    If you need an example of such a "make something up" idea for this... in line with thinking of unary like tally marks, you might opt to use just an incomplete tally mark to represent fractional quantities. The difficulty of course is that it becomes very difficult to recognize the difference between tally marks of varying length from one another, so this is not useful unless you are only working with whole or half quantities or similar restrictions. Alternatively, you can introduce a division symbol and have something like $1\div 111$ to represent a third, etc... – JMoravitz Jul 23 '20 at 19:05

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