
All the Numbers - Numberphile
About this video
Matt Parker talks Numberphile through the different kinds of numbers: algebraic, transcendental, computable, normal, and beyond. It shows how few numbers we can actually name or describe.
Why it appears in the archive
HN recommends it as an accessible explanation of number categories and why almost all numbers are unknowable.
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From the Hacker News discussion
It's fascinating how little we know about everyday numbers like pi and e, it's widely assumed that they are normal but there is no proof for this (and it's extremely difficult to do so). In fact we believe the fast majority of numbers are transcendental and normal but we only actually know of a single normal number, and it is a manufactured number. Numberphile has an excellent video on the numbers we know about and the quest to find / define normal numbers: [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗That's actually most numbers, but we don't know any yet. [VIDEO] numberphile (math YouTube series) describing some related concepts here.
Read original comment ↗It feels like every time there's a mathematics post on the front page I post a video by Matt Parker. This time, here's a video that explains from the basics what kinds of numbers exist: [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗Numberphile has a video explaining the relationship between the number categories, and includes a brief discussion of where Chaitin's Constant belongs. [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗I found Matt Parker's video to be a good way to visualize the fact that we 'know' essentailly 0% of numbers: [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗This video parallels the article, going further. I love the tag line, "We know none of the numbers." [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗You might appreciate this video where Matt Parker lays out the various classes of numbers and concludes by describing the normal numbers as being the overwhelmingly vast proportion of numbers and laments "we mathematicians think we know what's what, but so far we have found none of the numbers." [VIDEO]
Read original comment ↗It's worse than you make it sound, though: [VIDEO] In short, it isn't just that we have more computables than non-computables; there are categories of numbers like "normal" that nominally contain "all the numbers" but we can barely even name a handful.
Read original comment ↗