[seqfan] Re: Offsets of Large Integers Decomposed into Decimal Digits

[Neil Sloane]

Dear Hans, I understand your point, and indeed
the offset for decimal expansions has always been a bit strange. But there
is logic behind it, going bak 50 years

The present convention was aimed at numbers like pi = 3.14149..., which
gets offset 1,
and
10.877654... (I made that up) which gets offset 2,
and
.414 ... (sqrt(2)-1) which gets offset 0
In fact numbers like .3030... are the most common,
and they all get offset 0

Numbers like e = 2.71828.. get offset 1

Given those constraints, everything else is determined.

The system wasn't set to handle numbers like the speed of light, but it
handles them in a contistent manner, giving c an
offset of 9  , see A003678

Furthermore , although it gives strange results at times,
the present system is long-established, so I don't think it should be
changed

Best regards

Neil


On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 7:20 PM, Hans Havermann <gladhobo at teksavvy.com>
wrote:

> The FAQ for "offset" has: "If the sequence gives the decimal expansion of
> a constant, the offset is the number of digits before the decimal point.
> All of the examples give non-integers, i.e. real numbers with infinite
> expansions, suggesting a mindset that sees a constant as just such a
> number. What if the constant is a large integer?
>
> For example, the decimal expansion of 3^3^3^3 < https://oeis.org/A241292
> > is given a huge offset equal to the number of decimal digits in the
> integer. Doesn't it make more sense to see the expansion as a finite *list*
> of digits with offset 1?
>
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>



-- 
Dear Friends, I have now retired from AT&T. New coordinates:

Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation
11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
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