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2004 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Some irrational numbers

Authors : Martin Aigner, Günter M. Ziegler

Published in: Proofs from THE BOOK

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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This was already conjectured by Aristotle, when he claimed that diameter and circumference of a circle are not commensurable. The first proof of this fundamental fact was given by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1766. Our Book Proof is due to Ivan Niven, 1947: an extremely elegant one-page proof that needs only elementary calculus. Its idea is powerful, and quite a bit more can be derived from it, as was shown by Iwamoto and Koksma, respectively: π2 is irrational ander is irrational for rational r ≠ 0.

Metadata
Title
Some irrational numbers
Authors
Martin Aigner
Günter M. Ziegler
Copyright Year
2004
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05412-3_6

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