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In mathematics, "rational" is often used as a noun abbreviating "rational number". The adjective rational sometimes means that the coefficients are rational numbers. For example, a rational point is a point with rational coordinates (i.e., a point whose coordinates are rational numbers); a rational matrix is a matrix of rational numbers; a rational polynomial may be a polynomial with rational ...
Such a number is algebraic and can be expressed as the sum of a rational number and the square root of a rational number. Constructible number: A number representing a length that can be constructed using a compass and straightedge. Constructible numbers form a subfield of the field of algebraic numbers, and include the quadratic surds.
An axiomatic definition of the real numbers consists of defining them as the elements of a complete ordered field. [2] [3] [4] This means the following: The real numbers form a set, commonly denoted , containing two distinguished elements denoted 0 and 1, and on which are defined two binary operations and one binary relation; the operations are called addition and multiplication of real ...
Algebraic number theory is a branch of number theory that uses the techniques of abstract algebra to study the integers, rational numbers, and their generalizations. Number-theoretic questions are expressed in terms of properties of algebraic objects such as algebraic number fields and their rings of integers , finite fields , and function fields .
These identifications are formally abuses of notation (since, formally, a rational number is an equivalence class of pairs of integers, and a real number is an equivalence class of Cauchy series), and are generally harmless. It is only in very specific situations, that one must avoid them and replace them by using explicitly the above ...
For any real number x and any positive rational number T, (+) = (). The Dirichlet function is therefore an example of a real periodic function which is not constant but whose set of periods, the set of rational numbers, is a dense subset of R {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} } .
Some programming languages provide a built-in (primitive) rational data type to represent rational numbers like 1/3 and −11/17 without rounding, and to do arithmetic on them. Examples are the ratio type of Common Lisp , and analogous types provided by most languages for algebraic computation , such as Mathematica and Maple .
In his Essai sur la théorie des nombres (1798), Adrien-Marie Legendre derives a necessary and sufficient condition for a rational number to be a convergent of the simple continued fraction of a given real number. [4] A consequence of this criterion, often called Legendre's theorem within the study of continued fractions, is as follows: [5 ...