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!
More like this
Pseudonymous blogger outed.
Via His Holiness, there is an aggressively stupid paragraph in a New York Times movie review today:
This morning Mrs. Pontiff read me a review out of the New York Times for the film "A Serious Man." The opening paragraph of the review gives you an idea why she thought it might be relevant to me:
I don't think you see this too often. It is my first. An LOL cat used in an actual commercial advertisement, in this case for an esoteric software development tool on a techie web site:
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. :(