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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.
A fixed-point data type uses the same, implied, denominator for all numbers. The denominator is usually a power of two.For example, in a hypothetical fixed-point system that uses the denominator 65,536 (2 16), the hexadecimal number 0x12345678 (0x1234.5678 with sixteen fractional bits to the right of the assumed radix point) means 0x12345678/65536 or 305419896/65536, 4660 + the fractional ...
This category represents all rational numbers, that is, those real numbers which can be represented in the form: ...where and are integers and is not equal to zero. All integers are rational, including zero.
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 .
Examples of unexpected applications of mathematical theories can be found in many areas of mathematics. A notable example is the prime factorization of natural numbers that was discovered more than 2,000 years before its common use for secure internet communications through the RSA cryptosystem. [127]
No Liouville number is algebraic. The proof of this assertion proceeds by first establishing a property of irrational algebraic numbers. This property essentially says that irrational algebraic numbers cannot be well approximated by rational numbers, where the condition for "well approximated" becomes more stringent for larger denominators.
The set of rational numbers is not complete. For example, the sequence (1; 1.4; 1.41; 1.414; 1.4142; 1.41421; ...), where each term adds a digit of the decimal expansion of the positive square root of 2, is Cauchy but it does not converge to a rational number (in the real numbers, in contrast, it converges to the positive square root of 2).