Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It is indeed manufactured specifically to show the existence of "normal" numbers, which are, loosely, numbers where every finite sequence of digits is equally likely to appear. This property is both ubiquitous (almost every number is normal in a specific sense) and difficult to prove for numbers not specifically cooked up to be so.


Okay, fair. It just seemed to me to have pretty limited utility.


Hm who cares about utility in this case?


Well, if we don’t care about utility I could define infinitely many transcendental numbers with no utility other than I just made them up. The number that is the concatenation of the digits of all prime numbers in sequence, for instance: 0.23571113171923… I christen this Dave’s Number. (It probably already has a name, but I’m stealing it.) Let’s add it to the list. Now we can define Dave’s Second Number as the first prime added to Dave’s Number: 2.235711131723… Dave’s Third Number is the second prime added to Dave’s Number: 3.235711131723… Since we’re cataloguing numbers with no utility, let’s add them all to the list.


The list was for famous numbers. Yours might get there, but not so fast.


But it is definitely in the list of Aleph-1 Most Famous Transcendental Numbers.

So there's that.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: