A novel process and a pure hardware and architecturally symmetrical division circuit is described which recursively and bidirectionally finds a quotient from a dividend and a divisor by approximation. It is thus possible to start the calculation with the highest or lowest position value or at the same time with the two extremes of the divisor/divident/quotient, in a parallel process. The division circuit therefore consists of four parts, with two symmetrical pairs. The left-hand main circuit (1), which is symmetrical with the right-hand sub-circuit (3), processes the divisor and, via the two control signals D/I and AS, controls the left hand sub-circuit (2) which is symmetrical with the right-hand sub-circuit (4) and processes the dividend in order to find the quotient. The two symmetrical parts can operate mutually independently, i.e. separately, thus making it possible to perform two different division operations at the same time via the two symmetrical halves. The division process can thus be performed bidirectionally or on one side (left or right). The operands may be represented in a non-redundant format or in a digit format with a sign, where 'carry-ripple' transfer can be prevented by the representation strategy of the 'non-neighbouring non-zero trits' and a region centred on '1' will be alocated to the absolute value of the mantissa (M) after the standardisation process.