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Showing posts with label Factored number representation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Factored number representation. Show all posts

July 19, 2014

A Curious Way to Represent Numbers: Ternary Factor Tree Representation

This post is only likely to be of interest to those interested in the hidden backwaters of math, and maybe not too many of them. It also has little to do with the other posts here so far.

The conventional system of number representation cannot exactly represent most numbers. Fractions that have factors in the denominator that are not in the number system's base have infinite decimal representations (e.g. other than 2 and 5 for base 10). Square roots and other irrational numbers \ have infinite, non-repeating representations.


In the late 1990s I came up with an alternative system that can exactly represent any rational or irrational number as well as most transcendental numbers using only a finite number of bits. This type of representation is based upon the idea of factored representations of integers extended in a logical way to a nearly universal system of describing number structure.

Pretty but unrelated