Home Original page

Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Mar 17)

Erik Max Francis max at alcyone.com
Wed Mar 19 17:17:17 EST 2003 
Steven Taschuk wrote:

> Imho, the argument is not so interesting.  The equiprobable
> distribution property is a property of the symbol sequence, not
> strictly speaking of the number.  Thus the notion of normality of
> a number requires some function from numbers to symbol sequences,
> or a set of such functions.  That is, unique representations are
> required.

And while it's true that terminating and some repeating expansions in a
given base can have other representations (e.g., 0.999... = 1, 0.3759836
= 0.3759835999..., etc.), I'm pretty sure that all irrational expansions
in a given base are unique.

Since normality only concerns irrational numbers, the question of
non-unique expansions doesn't seem to come into play.

-- 
 Erik Max Francis / max at alcyone.com / http://www.alcyone.com/max/
 __ San Jose, CA, USA / 37 20 N 121 53 W / &tSftDotIotE
/  \ Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
\__/ Oscar Wilde
    Bosskey.net: Counter-Strike / http://www.bosskey.net/cs/
 A personal guide to Counter-Strike.
More information about the Python-list mailing list