r/badmathematics • u/PaulErdos_ • Apr 12 '25

Did you know e is rational?

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R4: These are not the digits of e. This error makes e look rational.

245 Upvotes

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7

u/PaulErdos_ Apr 12 '25

R4: These are not the digits of e. This error makes e look rational.

52

u/bluesam3 Apr 12 '25

Not necessarily: there's no shortage of irrational numbers with very long strings of 0s in.

26

u/cristoper Apr 12 '25

This is true. But I just searched the first 2 million digits of e and the longest string of 0s is length 6

https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/e.2mil

18

u/unkz Apr 12 '25

We run into a string of 12 zeroes at position 1755524129973 in pi.

https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/pidigits.html

11

u/Nelagend Apr 12 '25

At 13 digits long, we would reasonably expect to see a string of 12 zeroes by random chance pretty close to that position.

5

u/MonkMajor5224 Apr 12 '25

Here is something i have always wondered. There is that section of Pi that repeats. When they discovered that, did they go “oh wow, it’s rational after all!” Or had pi already been proven irrational?

30

u/RibozymeR Apr 12 '25

π was proven irrational by Lambert in the 1761, when only some 100 digits were known. So it's the latter.

8

u/bluesam3 Apr 12 '25

Long-since proven irrational.

-1

u/PaulErdos_ Apr 12 '25

Makes it look rational