On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 14:58, Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
A certain proportion of Ries formulas seem to be "tasteless" and the sort of thing that are never going to happen, like using (e^pi) or 1/ln(pi) or e or sin(1) in an exponent...
Yes, definitely. As Bill Gosper just pointed out to me, sin(1) anywhere is practically useless. And e^pi is a curio at best ("Gelfond's Constant" [5]). If you look at the webpage I wrote about ries [1], most of which is dedicated to "Stupid Math Tricks", perhaps the idea behind ries will be more clear. I actually started by looking at all the stuff in Plouffe's Inverter, consisting mostly of long expressions using obscure and undefined functions, peppered with the occasional fraction like "2087/1457" which I could have figured out on my own. Then, by chance I got a couple emails in a row from members of the Cult of 137 [3], and I decided to prove to myself (and to them) that it is easy to make all sorts of meaningless formulas for any number you choose. More to your point, the stuff on Plouffe's Inverter [4] is clearly all meaningful to someone, but most of it is of no meaning to any one person in particular, so we have a severe target marketing problem. Armed with these hundreds of higher-math functions, ries would be as bad, if not much worse. It will probably never have much serious application. Nevertheless, it sure is a lot of fun, and fun is a large part of the meaning of life. So there, xyzzy! - Robert. [1] http://mrob.com/pub/ries/index.html [2] http://pi.lacim.uqam.ca/ [3] http://mrob.com/pub/num/n-b137_035.html#cult_137 [4] http://bootes.math.uqam.ca/cgi-bin/ipcgi/lookup.pl?Submit=GO+&number=1.43239... [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelfond's_constant -- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com