Dave

I don't think the costs would be quite as high as that on a school network.

If you've got some strange method that you use, be it a completely different method or an adaptation of the method, then it should be able to be proved mathematically - i.e. mathematically sound.

Okay, I don't see the problem here. jordan, what you've said is true but it doesn't prove that pi is the 'largest prime'. As n->infinity, the statement becomes meaningless.

Look at it this way; no matter how many times you multiply pi by 10, it can never be a whole number; you can't just multiply things by infinity because it doesn't make logical sense - infinity isn't a number.

Whoops, forgot to add it. But it's the same as the one above anyway. It looks fairly obvious to me, don't know about anyone else. They look like they're included in the lengths.

ack, maple Mathematica > All

In a word; yes.

It wouldn't necessarily be prime and you'd definately need to take the decimal point away. Plus there's no such thing as "the largest" prime since you can always find a prime bigger than any prime before it (as I mentioned above).

To be fair, you're not going to use anything to do 10 variables by hand because there's simply no point. You just bung it into something like Mathematica and a good half hour's work is done in about a minute. I'm a firm believer in using a method that suits you. If it's good for you (and it's mathematically sound) then by all means go for it

It'll get to a point where people will think "this is stupid" at some stage though. Probably when (or if) someone comes up for a formula for the nth prime.

It sounds to me like you want a one-way function (similar to that being used for encryption and whatnot) like md5() or whatever. I'm a little confused by the rest of it though; care to elaborate a bit more?

Looks like it's the latter case to me. I think the easiest way would be using similar triangles (although it's quite quick to do it by integration). Look at my diagram that I've included. We know that the triangles A and B are similar to their respective larger triangles. (sorry they don't intersect the point on both big triangles but MS Word sucks). From this you can work out the areas of the smaller triangles (hint: consider the length of the hypoteneuse), the point at which the two lines intersect and the area of the square. Add the areas together and you've got your answer.

Well I daresay there's enough primes to keep everyone occupied for a very long time (in case anyone misinterprets this statement, it's a joke)

(in case you're wondering, the xe comes from the fact that for any number, [math]-1 \leq \sin(x) \leq 1[/math] so we can use the squeeze rule).

Mathematician (pretty obvious really)

I'll be lucky to get a 2.1 after my absolute cow of a Linear Algebra paper.

Go go Gaussian elimination

RAM is stupidly cheap atm anyway, best just to go and buy some more.

I should think it'd be fairly accurate.

hehe

I think I've been in that shop, it's very nice in there.

That's going to take quite a bit of effort

rofl The only 'party' we've had was to order in Pizza Hut and a bottle of JD (for myself, ofc)

All these things locally I didn't know about I have to confess the only mineral shops I've been into are around the lake district/peak district/etc.

I'm still laughing at number 6