this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes that's why they specified pi.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Still not enough, or at least pi is not known to have this property. You need the number to be "normal" (or a slightly weaker property) which turns out to be hard to prove about most numbers.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Wikipedia for normal numbers, and for disjunctive sequences, which is the slightly weaker property mentioned.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"Nearly all real numbers are normal (basically no real numbers are not normal), but we're only aware of a few. This one literally non-computable one for sure. Maybe sqrt(2)."

Gotta love it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

We're so used to dealing with real numbers it's easy to forget they're terrible. These puppies are a particularly egregious example I like to point to - functions that preserve addition but literally black out the entire x-y plane when plotted. On rational numbers all additive functions are automatically linear, of the form mx+n. There's no nice in-between on the reals, either; it's the "curve" from hell or a line.

Hot take, but I really hope physics will turn out to work without them.