Kudos again to Sol, this time for introducing me to Dr. James Tanton, a creative mathematician with his own YouTube channel of interesting videos here (okay, I'm a sucker for an Aussie accent):
http://www.youtube.com/user/DrJamesTanton
His homepage website is here:
http://www.jamestanton.com/
...and "Math Mama" reviewed some of his work here:
http://mathmamawrites.blogspot.com/search?q=%22james+tanton%22
In other news, another recent "tweet" (from Twitter) that caught my eye:
"It is known that e is irrational and that pi is irrational, but it is not known if their sum is irrational."
I'm wondering (maybe someone out there knows the answer) is it EVER the case that 2 irrational, transcendental numbers are known to sum to a rational???
1 comment:
I think you're missing the obvious cases. pi and 10 - pi are both irrational, but pi + (10-pi) is an integer.
It does seem extremely unlikely to happen for two "random" irrational numbers, though. Makes me wonder if the only reason it is "not known" is because no one has looked at it for long.
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