What is your favorite irrational number?

[JVS]

personally I like the number where the nth decimal place is one whenever n is a perfect square and zero elsewhere. Here are the first few terms .100100001000000100000000100000000001.....

[SharonAnn]

1. $87 billion is my favorite irrational number right now.

But I'm sure that soon I'll start thinking about $550 billion (the deficit?).

[LynneSin]

3. I'm voting with Sharon

How can you question that statement!!!!

[Fuzz]

2. 867-5309

[SmileyBoy]

8. Is Jenny there???

*snicker*

[OldEurope]

4. 42

cannot find a smily from outer space, so I take this: O8)

[populistmom]

5. Pi of course

Blueberry or chocolate cream in particular.

Sarah

[Wonk]

10. Mmmmm, Pi

:9

http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/pi/pi.html

[JackSwift]

15. I like Pie!

Lemon merangue pi, berry pi, pumpkin pi!

[newyawker99]

24. Congrats populistmom!! 600 posts

:toast:

[TrogL]

6. e

[Dead_Parrot]

23. Trogl wins!

The award for the shortest meaningful post goes to Trogl, this month...:party:

[MissMarple]

7. Uh... numbers are rational or irrational?

Have I fallen into an alternate universe?

[SmileyBoy]

9. Naw, it's some stupid advanced algebraic categorization.

There's Rational numbers, irrational ones, then there's natural numbers, and I think integers are seperate. I TOTALLY forgot what the definitions of these categories are.

[TrogL]

11. natural numbers

are integers as well as 0

(on edit, neither "and" or "plus" made sense)

[Dookus]

12. natural numbers

are just the regular numbers we know (1,2,3...)

Rational numbers are any integers or fractions

Irrational numbers are numbers that can't be expressed as a ratio of any two numbers.

[populistmom]

13. I think you're right

Natural numbers don't include zero.
Whole numbers include zero and the natural #s.
Integers include negative #s.

I think,
Sarah

[Kellanved]

27. He is

Natural numbers were originally defined by the Peano axioms. Essentially: There is a 0. Every natural number has exactly one successor (constructed by adding 1), that successor is a natural number as well.
However most textbooks do not include '0' in the natural numbers despite the original definition.

The definition of Integers is not as straightforward (Problem is defining negative numbers without the existence of a '-'; it's not hard, but somewhat lacking elegance). So let's just say this set includes the natural numbers and is closed to substraction. (subtracting any number from another always yields a valid result).

Whole numbers can be almost any Integer subset: I've seen the term used for N (natural numbers),Z* (positive integers and 0) and Z(integers).

The integers (Z) are a subset of the rational numbers (Q), which are a subset of the irrational numbers (R) (the next bigger one are the complex numbers, C).
Thus every natural number is a irrational number as well.

(Edit: see reply, I mixed up real and irrational. Sorry).

[Bake]

30. I'm not sure that's right

Both rational numbers and irrational numbers are subsets of real numbers. But rational numbers are not a subset of irrational numbers; by definition they are mutually exclusive.

Bake

[Kellanved]

32. you're correct

Language problem, I used irrational = real, as the former term wasn't used in my textbooks. I was about to edit my post, but as you've spotted it already...
:hi:

[JVS]

14. Or alternatively irrational numbers' decimal expansions don't terminate...

or repeat.

[starroute]

16. Phi

Better known as the Golden Mean.

1.6180339887499...

[SPICYHOT]

17. Number?

what's that!
:wtf:
:silly:
:freak:

[Rabrrrrrr]

18. another vote for e

I will always my mystical, epiphanic moment in integral calculus when the cosmos opened to me, and showed me how all of mathematics hinges on e. And I will always think it's totally cool that everything works because of a number that we can't express, becuase it's irrational.

And then later in college, when dealing with frequency repsonses of circuits and stuff, I always loved how one takes a real circuit, does a fourier transform on the function, and ends up with cool shit like e to the -2j pi (where j is the electrical engineer's symbol for i, the square root of -1, becuase we use i for current, we use j for square root of -1). That's cool.

[Kellanved]

19. Pi

However my favourite number is still i, the imaginary unit.

[Guaranteed]

20. The square root of -1?

Yup, that's my favorite too. :)

[Bake]

29. The square root of a negative number is not irrational

It's imaginary, if I remember my math correctly.

As in, the square root of -4 is 2i.

Bake

[Guaranteed]

31. That's true.

Irrational numbers may not be representable, but they ARE real.
My bad.
In that case, my favorite irrational number is "Danke Schoen" by Wayne Newton. It's catchy as hell but doesn't make a lick of sense to me.

[arwalden]

21. 99 & 44/100ths

[ProfessorGAC]

26. Irrational AND Untrue

Ivory was well over 99.44% pure for many many years, before they started using it. Someone at P&G thought that number sounded more memorable than 99.9%. Go figure.
The Professor

[arwalden]

28. Must Have Been Those "SATANISTS" At Proctor & Gamble...

You know that just LAST WEEK the CEO of P&G admitted on Donahue that he was a Satanist. I know it's true because I got an email letting me know. A friend of a friend of my mother's hairdresser told us all about it.

-- Allen

[regularguy]

22. 43

.

[qwertyMike]

33. Dubya - W

is the 23rd letter of the alphabet
23 - strange number

9-11-03 9+11+3 = 23!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[patdem]

34. 8643 is my personal favorite...thou I hope it is NOT irrational...but

national....In fact one of our famous posters is 8643!!! :bounce:

[Snow]

25. This (especially the e and the Phi) reminds me of an

old cartoon - that I just searched for & couldn't find - showing two men in Rennaissance clothes looking at a closed door on a narrow street. The address on the door is 112358.
One says to the other "Hmmmm this must be Fibonacci's place."

[Rabrrrrrr]

35. LOL!

I like it! I have to remember that joke.

Sounds like something that Stephenson would put into a novel.

[Shakeydave]

36. Liza Minelli singing..........................

"Joy To The World"! Oh, you meant like those counting things. Sorry! :freak:

[Deja Q]

37. Well, you asked...

69

Yes, it is irrational but you'll have to figure out why! :D