Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers
by dullcrisp on Thursday January 01, 2026 @03:12AM
(#46452221)
I don’t think those bits unambiguously represent the square root of five. Usually they represent either 3800603189 or -494364107.
Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers
by bsaul on Thursday January 01, 2026 @07:11AM
(#46453489)
Isn't "unambiguous representation" impossible in practice anyway ? Any representation is relative to a formal system.
I can define sqrt(5) in a hard-coded table on a maths program using a few bytes, as well as all the rules for manipulating it in order to end up with correct results.
Re:Fifteen Most Famous Transcendental Numbers
by dullcrisp on Thursday January 01, 2026 @08:07AM
(#46453796)
Well yeah but if we’re being pedantic anyway then “render these bits in UTF-8 in a standard font and ask a human what number it makes them think of” is about as far from an unambiguous numerical representation as you could get.
Of course if you know that you want the square root of five a priori then you can store it in zero bits in the representation where everything represents the square root of five.
As the other person pointed out, this is representing an irrational number unambiguously in a finite number of bits (8 bits in a byte). I fail to see how your original statement was careful :)
> representable in a finite number of digits or bits