Pessimist Singularitarian
#4
July 2nd, 2016,
19:49

Originally Posted by
hallie
Where do you get the -50 from?
Since there is a minus sign on one of the terms in the denominator and a minus sign on the numerator, if we divide by a negative number, then we will only have 1 minus sign in the denominator. I prefer the form:
$ \displaystyle \frac{a}{b-c}$
over:
$ \displaystyle \frac{-a}{c-b}$
Even though they are equivalent, I like fewer negatives. Then if we look at 550 and 20000, we see that 50 is the GCD, so dividing each term by -50 will result in the simplest terms in the form with fewer negative signs.