Dave

Yeah, that's the stuff

I think they've got a few good ideas atm, searching places like Titan for signs of life because of the heavy atmosphere. I think Europa's definately worth a good look as well. Some manned missions will be done eventually, I'm sure.

I still think that they should make him grow that beard and see how long they can get it by the time he dies.

Faf and Sayo tend to make a lot of the good quotes around here.

w00t

Bit pointless if it's an irrational number

wha?

Excellent, I'll possibly have a look at doing some of those questions to keep myself in practice and post some of the answers up here

Actually, to be fair, having read a little more of it, it's quite comical

I read the first couple words and gave up

rename it .html and I'll read it since my browser thinks it's plain text

Thought so. It seems like a bit of a beast of a problem to be honest, and perhaps it needs to be broken down into seperate cases that can be dealt with individually. Even then, there's no guarantee that it'll actually have any generalized solution at all.

Or not faf: there's also the minor point of your entire body being cooked from the inside out, and your eventual explosion from the pressure buildup But yeah, I think your DNA would be pretty messed up after that.

No, we can't.

I'd prefer him to be tried by a war crimes tribunal, because it seems to be the best way of getting him jailed forever. The last thing anyone wants to do is make that bloke a martyr.

Ah, we're not so bad really

Ah, I had to do 3 workbooks on it. Yay for comparison tests, ratio lemmas, and soforth... or not

As you may or may not know, there's a very useful constant, invented by Euler which is particularly useful in applications of Number Theory and the like. It's defined to be the limit as n -> :inf: of: Dn = (:sum:i=1 to n 1/i) - log(n+1) It's also known by the Greek letter :lcgamma: (gamma). I thought I'd share this quite nice problem to show you what the value of: :sum: (-1)n+1/n (i.e. the infinite sum 1 - 1/2 + 1/3 - 1/4 + ...) converges to. The proof goes something like this: :sum: i = 1 to (2n-1) (-1)i+1 = 1 - 1/2 + 1/3 - 1/4 + ... + 1/(2n-1) = 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/(2n-1) - 2[1/2 + 1/4 + ... + 1/(2n-2)] = D2n-1 + log(2n) - Dn-1 - log(n) = D2n-1 - Dn-1 + log(2) Now as n -> :inf:, D2n-1 -> :lcgamma:, Dn-1 -> :lcgamma:, so :sum: (-1)i+1 = log(2) Pretty nifty, eh?

I don't think it's possible to rearrange this equation. That's all I can say really, but I'm not entirely convinced by that substitution either tbh.

Ah, it's great fun really I do hope this thread doesn't encourage anyone to go sit on their microwave for the next 20 years though, because the likelyhood is it won't work

Nah, I love mathematics, it's just this term's been awful as far as work goes. I wouldn't be here if I didn't like maths

I hate number theory generally because of my absolutely awful Foundations course at university this term

Don't treat him badly in jail. Just put him in a prison for the rest of his life. Sorted.

Can't seem to open that attachment.

I think you two are talking about the same number from a cursary glance of the article