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In mathematics, "rational" is often used as a noun abbreviating "rational number". The adjective rational sometimes means that the coefficients are rational numbers. For example, a rational point is a point with rational coordinates (i.e., a point whose coordinates are rational numbers); a rational matrix is a matrix of rational numbers; a rational polynomial may be a polynomial with rational ...
All rational numbers are real, but the converse is not true. Irrational numbers (): Real numbers that are not rational. Imaginary numbers: Numbers that equal the product of a real number and the imaginary unit , where =. The number 0 is both real and imaginary.
In mathematics, the notion of number has been extended over the centuries to include zero (0), [3] negative numbers, [4] rational numbers such as one half (), real numbers such as the square root of 2 and π, [5] and complex numbers [6] which extend the real numbers with a square root of −1 (and its combinations with real numbers by adding or ...
Rational number arithmetic is the branch of arithmetic that deals with the manipulation of numbers that can be expressed as a ratio of two integers. [93] Most arithmetic operations on rational numbers can be calculated by performing a series of integer arithmetic operations on the numerators and the denominators of the involved numbers.
In mathematics, a rational function is any function that can be defined by a rational fraction, which is an algebraic fraction such that both the numerator and the denominator are polynomials. The coefficients of the polynomials need not be rational numbers ; they may be taken in any field K .
Example: Let a and b be nonzero real numbers. Then the subgroup of the real numbers R generated by a is commensurable with the subgroup generated by b if and only if the real numbers a and b are commensurable, in the sense that a/b is rational. Thus the group-theoretic notion of commensurability generalizes the concept for real numbers.
The set of rational numbers is not complete. For example, the sequence (1; 1.4; 1.41; 1.414; 1.4142; 1.41421; ...), where each term adds a digit of the decimal expansion of the positive square root of 2, is Cauchy but it does not converge to a rational number (in the real numbers, in contrast, it converges to the positive square root of 2).
This category represents all rational numbers, that is, those real numbers which can be represented in the form: ...where and are integers and is ...