Numberphile
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2019–2025
14:27 · 1.8M views · Mar 4, 2019
Matt Parker talks Numberphile through the different kinds of numbers: algebraic, transcendental, computable, normal, and beyond. It shows how few numbers we can actually name or describe.
HN recommends it as an accessible explanation of number categories and why almost all numbers are unknowable.
12 comments from Hacker News
It's fascinating how little we know about everyday numbers like pi and e, it's widely assumed that they are normal but there is no proof for this (and it's extremely difficult to do so). In fact we believe the fast majority of numbers are transcendental and normal but we only actually know of a single normal number, and it is a manufactured number. Numberphile has an excellent video on the numbers we know about and the quest to find / define normal numbers: this video
You might appreciate this video where Matt Parker lays out the various classes of numbers and concludes by describing the normal numbers as being the overwhelmingly vast proportion of numbers and laments "we mathematicians think we know what's what, but so far we have found none of the numbers." this video
It feels like every time there's a mathematics post on the front page I post a video by Matt Parker. This time, here's a video that explains from the basics what kinds of numbers exist: this video
Numberphile has a video explaining the relationship between the number categories, and includes a brief discussion of where Chaitin's Constant belongs. this video
That's actually most numbers, but we don't know any yet. this video numberphile (math YouTube series) describing some related concepts here.