- Announcements:
- Your next assignment to be graded, for the estimation unit, is due
this in Friday, 9/12. For this assignment, you don't need to type up
your work; but please -- be neat and clean.
- For Friday, read section 2.2 of our text (Numerical Patterns in
Nature -- Fibonacci numbers).
- Before we begin our unit on "Number Systems", let's wrap up our exercise from the last time:
- How many dice would fit in this room?
- Did you get any useful bounds?
- For today, the beginning of our "Number Systems" unit, you should have read this short description of bases, including "Base Eight" (here's a local copy).
- Let's start with the natural number 1729, which was the
subject of an interesting story in section 2.1.
- What did Hardy think of 1729?
- What did Ramanujan tell Hardy is so special about 1729?
- Our authors gave a comical "proof" of something after
this story -- what was it?
- One of the things we want to do with natural numbers is break them
down into simpler components. We will do this in various ways, using
powers, Fibonacci numbers, and Prime numbers.
- What is the meaning of each digit (the numbers 0 through 9) of the
number 1729?
- How would we write 1729 in base 8?
- How about 1729 in base 12?
- And now, should we manage to get to it: a Magic Trick, performed by the Great Fraudini
- How does the trick work?
Links:
- From the same author who brought you the bases paper above, we have a paper on the importance of units.
Website maintained by Andy Long.
Comments appreciated.