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Rules for calculating the periods of repeating decimals from rational fractions were given by James Whitbread Lee Glaisher in 1878. [5] For a prime p, the period of its reciprocal divides p − 1. [6] The sequence of recurrence periods of the reciprocal primes (sequence A002371 in the OEIS) appears in the 1973 Handbook of Integer Sequences.
For example, the reciprocal of 5 is one fifth (1/5 or 0.2), and the reciprocal of 0.25 is 1 divided by 0.25, or 4. The reciprocal function, the function f(x) that maps x to 1/x, is one of the simplest examples of a function which is its own inverse (an involution). Multiplying by a number is the same as dividing by its reciprocal and vice versa ...
A repeating decimal or recurring decimal is a decimal representation of a number whose digits are eventually periodic (that is, after some place, the same sequence of digits is repeated forever); if this sequence consists only of zeros (that is if there is only a finite number of nonzero digits), the decimal is said to be terminating, and is not considered as repeating.
An important application is Newton–Raphson division, which can be used to quickly find the reciprocal of a number a, using only multiplication and subtraction, that is to say the number x such that 1 / x = a. We can rephrase that as finding the zero of f(x) = 1 / x − a. We have f ′ (x) = − 1 / x 2 . Newton's ...
The reciprocal of a fraction is another fraction with the numerator and denominator exchanged. The reciprocal of 3 / 7 , for instance, is 7 / 3 . The product of a non-zero fraction and its reciprocal is 1, hence the reciprocal is the multiplicative inverse of a fraction. The reciprocal of a proper fraction is improper, and the ...
The multiplicative inverse (reciprocal) of the square root of two is a widely used constant, with the decimal value: [20] 0.70710 67811 86547 52440 08443 62104 84903 92848 35937 68847... It is often encountered in geometry and trigonometry because the unit vector, which makes a 45° angle with the axes in a plane, has the coordinates
When a number is written using ordinary decimal notation, leading zeros are not significant, and trailing zeros of numbers not written with a decimal point are implicitly considered to be non-significant. [110] For example, the numbers 0.056 and 1200 each have only 2 significant digits, but the number 40.00 has 4 significant digits.
In addition to calculating π, Shanks also calculated e and the Euler–Mascheroni constant γ to many decimal places. He published a table of primes (and the periods of their reciprocals) up to 110,000 and found the natural logarithms of 2, 3, 5 and 10 to 137 places. During his calculations, which took many tedious days of work, Shanks was ...