A Triplet Tree Forms One of the Most Beautiful Structures in Math
The Markov numbers reveal the secrets of irrational numbers and the patterns of the Fibonacci sequence. But there’s one question about them that has resisted proof for over a century. The post A Triplet Tree Forms One of the Most Beautiful Structures in Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Most people are only familiar with a handful of numbers that can’t be written as fractions, like $latex sqrt{2}$ or $latex pi$. But such numbers, called irrational numbers, are far more plentiful than fractions or rational numbers. How easy are they to approximate with fractions? If you use a fraction with an arbitrarily large denominator, you can get arbitrarily close. (As is well known, 22/7...
Originally published in Quanta Abstractions.
