Talk:Dyadic rational

Latest comment: 2 years ago by David Eppstein in topic "accurately approximate any real number"
Good articleDyadic rational has been listed as one of the Mathematics good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
August 18, 2021Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on August 28, 2021.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that dyadic rationals, fractions based on powers of two, can be easier to work with than other kinds of fractions for both schoolchildren and computers?

Solenoid again edit

The paragraph "The resulting topological group D is called the dyadic solenoid" does not make it clear whether D is the dyadic rationals or the dual group. Quotient group (talk) 21:52, 6 December 2009 (UTC)Reply

Origin of the term "Dyadic rational" edit

This article would benefit greatly if it covered the etymology and adoption of the term. Krushia (talk) 14:14, 31 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

The first usage I can find is in "A Closed Set of Normal Orthogonal Functions", J. L. Walsh, Am. J. Math. 1923. But Walsh uses the term (or actually the variant "dyadically rational") without explaining it, so it may well have an earlier origin than that. I don't know of a reliable source that covers this history so I am reluctant to put it in because of our rules on original research. Anyway, this article is about the concept of a dyadic rational number, not about their name, and the concept goes back to the ancient Egyptians as the article already states. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:02, 14 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

"accurately approximate any real number" edit

Isn't this a contradiction? "accurately" and "approximate" shouldn't be used together. ciao --Pentaclebreaker (talk) 08:43, 28 August 2021 (UTC)Reply

There are precise bounds on how accurately these numbers can approximate arbitrary reals, later in the article. The sentence you are complaining about is the lead's summary of that later section. It is doing exactly what the lead is supposed to do, summarizing the content of the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:25, 28 August 2021 (UTC)Reply