Ravi Varadhan wrote: > > Finding sufficiently accurate rational approximations to a real > number, can be done using fractions() in MASS, which uses > continued fractions. > In a slight off-topic digression, I recently learned that any irrational number that can be nicely approximated by rational numbers is transcendental. The number that gets the _worse_ approximations is the ubiquitous Golden Ratio:
phi <- (1 + sqrt(5))/2 There's a way to express this precisely, something like |x - p/q| < 1/q^n (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville_number) Alberto Monteiro ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
