From: ksbrown@seanet.com (Kevin Brown) Newsgroups: sci.math Subject: Re: Can e & pi be easily related? Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 04:15:26 GMT On 21 Jun 1998 jarweinst@aol.com (JarWeinst) wrote: > I don't even think we know whether e*pi is irrational, > although all our intuitions say [it is]... Indeed, showing that > e*pi is rational would revolutionize computations for both > numbers.. It's known that e * pi is not rational, but we don't whether e + pi is rational, and we certainly don't know if both are transcendental, although we do know that at least one of them must be. By the way, here's an interesting little formula involving the product of pi and e (which will be utterly unintelligible if you're reading this with something other than a fixed pitch font, and maybe even regardless): _______ / pi e 1 1 1 / ----- = 1 + --- + ----- + ------- + .... / 2 1*3 1*3*5 1*3*5*7 + 1 ------------------ 1 1 + ---------------- 2 1 + -------------- 3 1 + ----------- 4 1 + -------- 5 1 + ------ 1 + ... I probably don't even need to say who came up with this - which raises an interesting question: Is any other mathematician's work so instantly recongizable? For the record, Ramanujan posed the above formula as question 541 in the Journal of Indian Math. On an unrelated point, does anyone know where the first "3" appears in the base-pi representation of e? I think the leading digits are something like e = 2.2021201002111...(3)?... base pi where the kth digit is the largest integer d such that d/pi^k is less than or equal to the current remainder. Similarly the representation of pi in the base e is pi = 10.101002020002111... base e but of course here there can never be any digits other than 0,1, or 2. ______________________________________________________________ | MathPages /*\ http://www.seanet.com/~ksbrown/ | | / \ | |___________/"I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in _| the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras, on a salary of only 20L per anum. I am now about 23 years of age." [He was 25.]