3 ms·

Exactly, most of the real numbers have an infinite number of digits!

• JadeNB 11y ago
  All real numbers have an infinite number of digits. For the numbers that you probably meant to exclude, all but finitely many of those infinitely many digits are 0. (This is almost just nitpicking, but in another sense it's important: viewing an apparently terminating decimal expansion as actually 0-padded lets one say correctly that "a real number is rational if and only if its decimal expansion eventually repeats", full stop, rather than having to add the qualification "… or is eventually 0.")
  • x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
    Padding doesn't count...
    • JadeNB 11y ago
      Well, to be sure, one can say that it does count or that it doesn't—the axioms of mathematics are only as humans make them. I was arguing why it might make sense to have it count. Another reason that it might be a good reason to have it count: by my definition, I can say "the decimal expansion of a number eventually repeats if and only if the binary expansion of that number eventually repeats." This becomes considerably more awkward if you don't consider a terminating expansion as consisting of eventually repeating 0's; for example, 1/5 has a terminating decimal expansion 0.2 but an immediately-repeating binary expansion 0.repeat(0011).
• baddox 11y ago
  Most of them aren't even computable. As in, there's no Turing machine that can generate the nth digit.