Re:Mathematicians find a new class of digitally delicate primes
by tialaramex on Friday April 02, 2021 @07:39AM
(#26670604)
In a way numbers are much worse than that. Imagine writing a number down as a decimal fraction, like 2.0 or 4.86. If when you do this, the digits go on forever and no digit (such as a zero or a three) appears much more or less often than the you'd expect at random, that number is called "normal in base 10". If that's true in every base, it's just called "normal".
That doesn't sound very normal, probably no numbers you usually think about have these properties, why do mathematicians call them "normal"? Well, the mathematicians have proved that almost all real numbers are normal. It just turns out that we haven't the faintest idea how to find them and we never needed them for anything so we didn't notice how abundant they apparently are.
We aren't even sure if some weird numbers we do know about are normal, Pi looks pretty normal, but we can't prove it is.
That doesn't sound very normal, probably no numbers you usually think about have these properties, why do mathematicians call them "normal"? Well, the mathematicians have proved that almost all real numbers are normal. It just turns out that we haven't the faintest idea how to find them and we never needed them for anything so we didn't notice how abundant they apparently are.
We aren't even sure if some weird numbers we do know about are normal, Pi looks pretty normal, but we can't prove it is.