Timeline for Handling unsolicited proofs of famous mathematical problems
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 16, 2014 at 13:22 | comment | added | PatrickT | The idea in the second paragraph is excellent! | |
| May 14, 2014 at 9:24 | comment | added | daviewales | OK. I think I misunderstood your meaning. When you said "better than 355/113", I thought you meant "closer to pi", rather than "closer to pi, with small integers and mathematical rigour". | |
| May 14, 2014 at 7:42 | comment | added | gnasher729 | @daviewales: That's actually a rubbish and rather thoughtless approximation, since better approximations with much smaller numbers are known. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 22:06 | comment | added | user10060 | They're also slightly more profound than that: a rational is a convergent $a_n/b_n$ to $\alpha$ if and only if $|\alpha - a_n/b_n| < 1/b_n^2$. The next convergent to pi is rather large, so presumably the man's work had some interesting nontrivial (though not new) merit. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 17:08 | comment | added | E.P. | To be precise, the convergents $a_n/b_n$ of the continued fraction expansion of a given real number $x$ are provably the best rational approximations with denominator $\leq b_n$. | |
| May 13, 2014 at 12:12 | comment | added | daviewales | What's special about approximations of pi as fractions of rational numbers? I just found a really good one: 314159265359/100000000000 | |
| May 12, 2014 at 17:21 | history | answered | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |