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Thus, the amount of material left is 2 −1 = 1/2 raised to the (whole or fractional) number of half-lives that have passed. Thus, after 3 half-lives there will be 1/2 3 = 1/8 of the original material left. Therefore, the mean lifetime is equal to the half-life divided by the natural log of 2, or:
Instead, the half-life is defined in terms of probability: "Half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay on average". In other words, the probability of a radioactive atom decaying within its half-life is 50%. [2] For example, the accompanying image is a simulation of many identical atoms undergoing radioactive decay.
Continued fraction. A finite regular continued fraction, where is a non-negative integer, is an integer, and is a positive integer, for . In mathematics, a continued fraction is an expression obtained through an iterative process of representing a number as the sum of its integer part and the reciprocal of another number, then writing this ...
An Egyptian fraction is a finite sum of distinct unit fractions, such as That is, each fraction in the expression has a numerator equal to 1 and a denominator that is a positive integer, and all the denominators differ from each other. The value of an expression of this type is a positive rational number ; for instance the Egyptian fraction ...
Ratio. In mathematics, a ratio (/ ˈreɪʃ (i) oʊ /) shows how many times one number contains another. For example, if there are eight oranges and six lemons in a bowl of fruit, then the ratio of oranges to lemons is eight to six (that is, 8:6, which is equivalent to the ratio 4:3). Similarly, the ratio of lemons to oranges is 6:8 (or 3:4) and ...
The reverse process of expressing a proper rational fraction as the sum of two or more fractions is called resolving it into partial fractions. For example, For example, 2 x x 2 − 1 = 1 x − 1 + 1 x + 1 . {\displaystyle {\frac {2x}{x^{2}-1}}={\frac {1}{x-1}}+{\frac {1}{x+1}}.}
Calculus. In mathematics, the harmonic series is the infinite series formed by summing all positive unit fractions: The first terms of the series sum to approximately , where is the natural logarithm and is the Euler–Mascheroni constant. Because the logarithm has arbitrarily large values, the harmonic series does not have a finite limit: it ...
For example, using single-precision IEEE arithmetic, if x = −2 −149, then x/2 underflows to −0, and dividing 1 by this result produces 1/(x/2) = −∞. The exact result −2 150 is too large to represent as a single-precision number, so an infinity of the same sign is used instead to indicate overflow.