5 ms·

Every number is special. Every number has something on where you can apply rules to, and thus makes it special. Is there a database containing all the numbers a

• andrewflnr 15y ago
  All the numbers? ALL of them? :)
  • GrangalanJr 15y ago
    Yes. All 45,000,000,000 of them. :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drE5cHe6c3s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drE5cHe6c3s
  • _delirium 15y ago
    There's an old mathematics joke proving by contradiction that there cannot exist uninteresting integers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
• ZeSmith 15y ago
  Which domain? Reals? That's a lot of numbers. Infinity, in fact.
  • pavel_lishin 15y ago
    Not just an infinity, but a bigger infinity than the integers.
    • tambourine_man 15y ago
      That has always bothered me deeply. We measure something by comparing its frontiers (where it begins and ends) to something else. If this something has none, this clearly cannot be done. Of course, it's also clear that between 0 and 1 you have infinite real numbers. But is an infinite inside an infinite enough to provide a size hierarchy? Maybe the quantum physics guys will prove that the universe is granular in every possible level and that everything is just an enormous pile of huge natural numbers. Then infinity and paradoxes will just be a fun thought experiment, and reality will still be pragmatically ungraspable, but profoundly boring.
      • mturmon 15y ago
        Don't be bothered -- this is not actually how it's done. What you do to compare sizes of sets A and B is, construct a 1:1 function mapping everything in A to something in B and vice versa. If such a function exists, they're the same cardinality. It's a little long-winded, but see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number This idea, which seems obvious only in retrospect, is due to Georg Cantor (the guy with the set, and the paradox).
        • tambourine_man 15y ago
          Yeah, but if natural numbers are infinite, than there will always be a natural number to map to a real one, therefore they're the same cardinality.
          • Chirono 15y ago
            Strangely enough, this isn't actually true! Ok, so it is true that if you were to go through one by one and label some real numbers with natural number, you would never run out. But the interesting thing comes when you start with the assumption that you have labelled every real number with a natural number. Turns out there's always some left over... There is a famous proof about this by Georg Cantor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantors_diagonal_argument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantors_diagonal_argument
            • tambourine_man 15y ago
              It's only a proof if you take a leap of faith and accept certain things. You could argue that that's how math works, but to me the less axioms we need, the better. I really love this quote from Wittgenstein: "Where the nonsense starts is with our habit of thinking of a large number as closer to infinity than a small one". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_the...
              • 15y ago
  • tokenadult 15y ago
    Heck, there are infinite prime numbers, all of which are natural numbers. http://primes.utm.edu/notes/proofs/infinite/euclids.html http://primes.utm.edu/notes/proofs/infinite/euclids.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EuclidsTheorems.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EuclidsTheorems.html http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/p/primeprf.htm http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/cyc/p/primeprf.htm http://primes.utm.edu/notes/proofs/infinite/ http://primes.utm.edu/notes/proofs/infinite/
• JimmyL 15y ago
  If you're looking for purely mathematical facts, there's a list of something "special" about each number from 0 to 9999 at http://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/numbers.html http://www2.stetson.edu/~efriedma/numbers.html. For smaller numbers, Wikipedia is pretty good too.
  • meric 15y ago
    "8833 = 88^2 + 33^2" Hey, that's cheating! (Yes, I went through over eight thousand numbers to find that one.)
• gosub 15y ago
  there are no uninteresting numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
  • tlb 15y ago
    Only applies to integers. Most real numbers are not interesting.
    • philh 15y ago
      Unless you assume the well-ordering principle.
      • btilly 15y ago
        That only makes them interesting relative to a given well-ordering. Since nobody knows the details of any well-ordering of the real numbers, this severely limits the interestingness of a given real number.