My number theory course has recently moved on to things that are a bit more technical and esoteric than our earlier fare, so I haven't felt they would make good blog fodder. If you need a quick math fix (and who doesn't?), you can have a look at this guest post I wrote for the Oxford University Press blog. It contains a few musings about pi, inspired by a recent satirical post over at HuffPo. Enjoy!
- Log in to post comments
More like this
In which we look back on the ninth full year of this blog, and one of the most unpleasant incidents in the whole run, which nearly ruined what was otherwise a good year.
------------
This is probably going to be the longest of these posts, at least in terms of the number of links included-- I've…
The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Sam Dupuis from the Science…
Karl Bates is the Manager of Research Communications at Duke University where he is involved in a number of very cool new online projects. He is also a "repeat offender" - his experience at the first Science Blogging Conference did not stop him from attending the second one last month.
Welcome to A…
I'm on my way to a taping of the Humanist Views with Host Scott Lohman. I do these now and then and have done so since I first moved to Minnesota back when it was still cold here. We'll be talking about science knowledge, and why basic science knowledge is important. We'll also be talking about…
Oh dear. A one point you state that 0.25 is the only way to represent 1/4. Surely we haven't forgotten that terminating decimals have two representations as decimals, and 1/4 is also 0.24999999... :-)
And I can't let a pi post go by without my favorite pi fact, that proves that pi is strictly less than 22/7: int_0^1 x^4(1-x)^4/(1+x^2) dx = 22/7-pi, and the integrand is nonnegative.
oh well ... already posted this comment to the wrong entry : Prof. Rosenhouse : Was wondering if you had ever heard of the Chudnovsky brothers (or met them?!), written about in the book "Panic in Level 4: ... Journeys to the edge of science". They are two russian born geniuses who built a supercomputer in their apartment in New York with the aim of finding the order in Pi. Believe they won the Macarthur prize (?). It's a great story!
Stephen --
What blog post did you read? I didn't say that the only way of representing 1/4 is .25. I said that if you divide one integer by another the resulting decimal either terminates or repeats. I used 1/4=.25 simply as an example of one that terminates.
ftfkdad --
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the folks you're talking about. :(