Elliot Temple posed the following math puzzle: How many square roots does it take to get 10100100 down to a small number? (And what number is it?)
Note that abc = a(bc).
Answer: 665 square roots takes you down from 10100100 to around 4.5.
Proof:
Here, lg means the base 10 logarithm, and dot (·) means multiplication. I will use the following facts:
Proof:
We can now use the lemma to show that 4.52665 = 1010665 lg 2 + lg lg 4.5. And 665 lg 2 + lg lg 4.5 ≈ 200.▢
You can also check the answer with Robert Munafo's Hypercalc, an online calculator that works with very large integers. To do this, enter 4.5^(2^665) in Hypercalc. It evaluates it to something very close to 10^10^200.
Note that abc = a(bc).
Answer: 665 square roots takes you down from 10100100 to around 4.5.
Proof:
Here, lg means the base 10 logarithm, and dot (·) means multiplication. I will use the following facts:
- (ab)c = abc
- xaxb = xa+b
- x = 10lg x
abc = 1010c lg b + lg lg aExample: 223 = 28 = 256 = 10103 lg 2 + lg lg 2
Proof:
abc | |
= | (10lg a)(10lg b)c |
= | (10lg a)10c lg b |
= | 10lg a · 10c lg b |
= | 1010lg lg a · 10c lg b |
= | 1010c lg b + lg lg a ▢ |
We can now use the lemma to show that 4.52665 = 1010665 lg 2 + lg lg 4.5. And 665 lg 2 + lg lg 4.5 ≈ 200.▢
You can also check the answer with Robert Munafo's Hypercalc, an online calculator that works with very large integers. To do this, enter 4.5^(2^665) in Hypercalc. It evaluates it to something very close to 10^10^200.
No comments:
Post a Comment