Item — HN Reader

One of the talks I give has this in it. The talk includes Continued Fractions and how they can be used to create approximations. That the way to find 355/113 as an excellent approximation to pi, and other similarly excellent approximations.

I also talk about the Continued Fraction algorithm for factorising integers, which is still one of the fastest methods for numbers in a certain range.

Continued Fractions also give what is, to me, one of the nicest proofs that sqrt(2) is irrational.

1 comments

Thanks! Do you have a version of that talk published anywhere? I tried searching your YouTube channel [1] for a few things like "golden ratio" "ratio", "irrational"... but didn't find anything.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@colinwright/

That's not my channel. Alas, my name is fairly common, and there are some proper whackos who publish widely.

I only have one video in my channel ... never really got going, but I keep promising myself I'll start doing more. My channel is here:

https://www.youtube.com/@ColinTheMathmo

I don't have that talk on video, but I can probably sketch the content for you if you're interested, and then give pointers to pages with the details.

How to contact me is in my profile ... I'm happy to write a new thing.

Aw thanks, but I think the Mathologer and Numberphile videos are sufficient for me if you haven't already uploaded yours. I don't want to bother you doing extra work for little return!

I honestly should sketch out the talk anyway. I haven't seen anyone else bring together the proof that sqrt(2) is irrational, and the Continued Fraction method of factoring.

Yeah, maybe I'll hack out a sketch tomorrow, show it to a few people, and get them to tell me what's missing so I can flesh it out.

I owe Chalkdust an article anyway.