Guinness Book of Records??

[Franklin T. Adams-Watters]

Actually, there's good reason to think pi is not the MOST FAMOUS TRANSCEDENTAL CONSTANT OF *THE WHOLE COSMOS*.  It's only a historical accident that we wound up with the ratio of the circumference to the diameter.  It could just as easily have been 2*pi: the ratio of the circumference to the radius.  And while the relationship is obviously trivial, 2*pi is slightly more fundamental mathematically: it is the period for sin and cos, among other things.

Antti Karttunen <karttu at megabaud.fi> wrote:

>
>
>Ed Pegg wrote:
>> 
>> > > How about "Most referenced mathematical work"
>> 
>>   That would Euler's opus.  After that, perhaps Euclid's Elements.
>> 
>>   The problem with Most-referenced site, or most formulas, or most
>> cross-references, is that they are easily surpassed by a willingness to be
>> useless.  No matter which of these records you pick, it would be easy to
>> script up a website or website that surpassed these records, with
>> meaningless data.
>> 
>>   aol.com or yahoo.com is likely the biggest website, due to extensive
>> building by members.
>> 
>>   So far as I know, the OEIS won't even be at
>> http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/ next year.  Since the group
>> wants OIES in a book, published for posterity, is AT&T willing to promise to
>> host OIES forever?
>> 
>>   I think an attempt to cast OEIS as a record-setter is misguided.  It would
>> be far more useful to cast OEIS as an *authority* for records ... and as
>> such, it could be placed within Guinness far more easily, without fear of
>> competition.
>
>Contains the decimal and continued fraction expansions of
>THE MOST FAMOUS TRANSCEDENTAL CONSTANT OF *THE WHOLE COSMOS*, Pi = 3.141592653...
>
>Contains the decimal and continued fraction expansions of
>THE SECOND MOST FAMOUS TRANSCEDENTAL CONSTANT OF *THE WHOLE COSMOS*, e = 2.718281828459...
>
>Contains the decimal and continued fraction expansions of
>THE THIRD MOST FAMOUS TRANSCEDENTAL CONSTANT OF *THE WHOLE COSMOS*, ...
>(No, at this point our knowledge of the level and interests of the extra-terrestrial
>mathematicians don't allow to make any assumptions... I'm reminded
>of this particular constant appearing in the Chaos theory, not
>discovered until recently...)
>
>
>Terveisin,
>
>Antti
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>> 
>>   --Ed Pegg Jr
>


-- 
Franklin T. Adams-Watters
16 W. Michigan Ave.
Palatine, IL 60067
847-776-7645



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