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SharkD wrote:
> In the process of writing one of my scenes I arrived through tedious
> trial and error at a particular constant with a value of 0.28867519
> (plus an unknown number of additional decimals after the last place).
>
> No matter to how many decimal places I manually determine the value, I'd
> rather know for sure *where* the number came from and *what* it
> represents. Is it a mathematical constant like 'e'? Is it the result of
> some trigonometric expression?
The expression for your number could be arbitrarily complex. I found at
least half a dozen simple expressions which give an answer *vaguely*
similar to the one above, but none of them are especially close to it.
To give you an example: The Fibonacci numbers. Each Fibonacci number is
the sum of the previous two numbers in the sequence. (The first two
numbers are 1 and 1.) If you divide a Fibonacci number by the one before
it, the sequence of numbers gradually approaches the number
1.618033988749894848204586834...
This number, it turns out, is equal to (1 + Sqrt(5))/2. (WTF?)
And if you think that's weird, try adding up 1/x^2 from x=1 to infinity.
The result just happens to be exactly pi^2 / 6.
The number you seek is probably a polynomial, polynomial root, or
trigonometric ratio thereof. There's a hell of a lot of potential
candidates to choose from. It's probably fundamentally impossible to
tell which one just by looking at the number itself. (Which, by the way,
you seem to have an aweful lot of digits for already...)
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