4 ms·
It still boggling we haven't proved the sum of pi + e is irrational. Who cares anyway?
by nomemory 3y ago
It still boggling we haven't proved the sum of pi + e is irrational. Who cares anyway?
- xanderlewis 3y ago> Who cares anyway? I can’t tell if you’re just joking. Proofs of facts that seem obvious or irrelevant are very important not for the yes-no question they answer but for the development of the deep mathematical theory they necessitate.
- nomemory 3y agoIt was a joke, I know there are lots of people who care about that.
- SOTGO 3y agoIt's not that mind-boggling. In general we need to use specific properties of numbers to prove whether they are irrational, and pi+e has very few useful properties to work from. Even proving pi is irrational is not trivial and it is one of the transcendental numbers we know the most about.
- xanderlewis 3y ago> we need to use specific properties of numbers to prove whether they are irrational Indeed, one could say that all we know about numbers are their properties. A number is just an existence assertion about an object fulfilling some property (possibly uniquely).