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I hereby submit a proof that 0=2. It has to do with the following question which I saw in the Unanswered queue:

Locus of centers of circles tangent to a given line and a given circle

I went to answer it only to find two answers already present, thus 0=2. As a corrollary, one of the answers was what I was going to answer, and better presented, causing me to upvote it. So ended my glorious quest.

Why does this happen? How do I work around it? Is there something the asker should be doing?

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  • $\begingroup$ It's because "answered" means "has an answer with positive score". $\endgroup$
    – Daniel Fischer
    Apr 27, 2016 at 9:57
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    $\begingroup$ So when I upvoted an answer I actually solved my own problem? :-S $\endgroup$
    – Oscar Lanzi
    Apr 27, 2016 at 10:00
  • $\begingroup$ Sort of. Give it a few minutes because of caching, but by upvoting the answer you removed the question from the "unanswered" list. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel Fischer
    Apr 27, 2016 at 10:02
  • $\begingroup$ How do I work around? Can I sort or filter the questions in some way to avoid such surprises, or am I stuck having to inspect the answer number on each question? $\endgroup$
    – Oscar Lanzi
    Apr 27, 2016 at 10:05
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    $\begingroup$ You can search [geometry] is:q answers:0 to find questions tagged geometry with no answers. See also the help centre page on searching. That's somewhat inconvenient, though. So maybe indeed check the answer count. On the other hand, removing questions from the queue by upvoting deserving answers is also a good thing to do. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel Fischer
    Apr 27, 2016 at 10:13
  • $\begingroup$ Could you convert that to an answer so I can accept/upvote it and remove the ? from the queue before somebody proves that 0=1? $\endgroup$
    – Oscar Lanzi
    Apr 27, 2016 at 10:16
  • $\begingroup$ I'm divided between answering and marking as duplicate. Also, $0 = 2 \implies \frac{1}{2}\cdot 0 = \frac{1}{2}\cdot 2$, qed. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel Fischer
    Apr 27, 2016 at 10:39

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