## Archive for the ‘Math’ Category

### Why π is irrational (part 4 of 5)

20 July 2010

In this post I show that the integral is an integer.
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### Massive prime numbers

19 July 2010

I participate in PrimeGrid, a distributed computing project to find large prime numbers of various types. It seems that my computer just found such a massive prime–a Proth prime, to be precise. Proth primes have the form



where k and n are integers. Mine was



which, when written out in full base-10 notation, is 157897 digits and can be found beyond the “read the rest of this entry” tag (warning: this particular entry will load slowly in its entirety).
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### Why π is irrational (part 3 of 5)

15 June 2010

In this post I use the derivatives of f(x) to create a new function, F(x), that will help us evaluate the integral from part 1.
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### Why π is irrational (Part 2 of 5)

8 June 2010

In this post I introduce the function f(x) and look at some of its properties.
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### Why π is irrational (Part 1 of 5)

8 June 2010

Through the next several posts, I will be taking you through a proof of why π is irrational. The proof was first given by Ivan Niven in 1947 and requires only basic calculus to understand it.
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