Posts tagged big numbers
Graham’s Number Is Too Big for Me to ...
I was going to write an April Fool’s Day post with the title “Mathematicians Declare Graham’s Number Equal to Infinity.” Graham’s number is really big, but of course, it’s precisely 0% as big as infinity. On the other hand, everything we touch is finite, so in some sense, Graham’s number is probably & [...]
Goldbach Variations
In mid-May, Harald Helfgott of the École Normale Supériure in Paris published a proof of the ternary Goldbach conjecture, a longstanding question in number theory.
Harald Helfgott, who finished the proof of the ternary Goldbach conjecture. Image: Harald Helfgott.
Of course, making substantial progress on a problem that some of the most brilli [...]
Big Numbers Are Big
Image: xkcd
So if you’re worried that human creativity is worthless because every possible piece of literature, the MP3 of every song anyone will ever sing, the choreography of every ballet, along with the DNA of every person who will ever perform it, is encoded in pi, don’t despair. No one with any sense will be switching to a pi-mining stra [...]
Your Life in Pi
At Slate, I wrote about a pi meme that’s been going around for a few months, most recently shared by George Takei’s facebook page.
We don’t know for sure that pi contains all possible strings of decimal digits, but on a deeper level, the meme is right. And if it gets you pondering the mysteries of infinity, so much the bett [...]
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