h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh! it'll work with other values? I never even thought about that. hmm.
I'm not really comfortable with including that, OH... bit difficult
Looking back at the previous post it might be simplest just to use P for Phi and p for phi.
Thanks, Gnomon
So does anything stand out though, in the entry, that should be changed?


btw would a series similiar to the square roots and the fraction results from x=x^2-1? (x=x^2-1= (x^2-1)^2-1=((x^2-1)^2-1)^2-1, etc...)
*thinks about it*... it should work out to be Phi also?

correction *bit difficult /to understand/

Jimster has said that he got a bit trigger-happy and pressed the "Accept" button early. So he won't assign it to any sub-editor. We're to let him know when it's ready and he'll sub-edit it himself.

There are a few minor problems, which I don't feel like pointing out at the moment (it's 12:15 am) so I'll try and deal with them at lunch-time tomorrow.

*checks watch* Lunchtime?

OK, OK! I didn't manage it at lunchtime.

I don't mind I wasn't on then...

Um, is that big fraction going to be allowed in the EG? I don't think it meets the guidelines...

I wish you hadn't said that.

Well then..
Maybe they'll blob it? They've done that before I hear...

... or maybe they will not blob it. The only rule it breaks is the use of to draw the lines that make the fraction. That can also be done by using ——...— but that will make the fractions much more difficult to create. The number of them has to be altered to suit what is above and below the line, whereas adjusts itself. Another trouble with — is that it has full character height, whereas does not, so using — would also be less pleasing on the eye in the finished result.

maybe they'll make an exception...?

Couldn't it just make the lines with a table border?

I've had another look at this.

Major points:

1. I'm not happy with you using Phi for 1.618... and phi for 0.618... Any articles I've seen used the name Phi and phi interchaneably to mean 1.618... They used Phi at the start of sentences and phi everywhere else, the same as you would do with pi.

If you adopt this approach, you will have no name for the reciprocal of phi other than "the reciprocal of phi".

2. You say "The line does not cross any points other than the origin". In fact the line crosses an infinite number of points. What you mean is that the line does not cross any points where both x and y have integer values.

Minor points:

in a many ways --> in many ways

There's an x at the end of the continued fraction which shouldn't be there.

Use the square root symbol instead of sqrt in the formula for Fn.

Okey dokey...

But if you use Phi and phi to mean 1.618 what do you use for .618? Just put Phi-1 or phi's reciprocal or whatever each time?

"you will have no name for the reciprocal of phi other than "the reciprocal of phi"." -the reciprocal of phi is (was) (using the capital & lower case thingy) Phi. (and vice versa of course)...

You could use Φ and φ (the upper case and lower case Greek letters) to avoid the problem about starting sentences with capital letters. My suggestion was made in posting 21, but you must follow some precedent, as the golden ratio has been written about many times before.

Using √ to get a square root symbol would seem to be a good idea, except that the last time I suggested this, Gnomon objected (F47997?thread=371908), so his recommendation now is difficult to understand.

Since the entry already contains the square root symbol, it makes no sense to also use 'sqrt'. What I meant in that other thread was that you shouldn't include strange non-Ascii symbols unless you are sure they are going to work.

The reciprocal of phi is 1/1.618... = 0.618... since I had already said that both Phi and phi mean 1.618 in the paragraph I was describing. You should not use capital and lowercase Greek letters interchangeable. The symbol for 1.618 is φ and not Φ as far as I can make out.

As Old Hairy says, there must be a precedent in other articles about phi for what to call 1/phi.

OKay then...

I had decided ot change it so that Phi and phi both meant 1.618, and I put 'p' to equal 0.618 until I got a better symbol for it. Though I see I wasn't consistent with using φ for 1.618. (While we're on the subject do you think all the x's in the equations should be φ's?)


A question:In this equation: Fn=(Phi^n-(-phi)^n)/sqrt(5) , does phi=.618 and Phi=1.618? or are they same thing?

Okay this is confusing:


Phi
Dunlap-63 Vajda and Dunlap use tau (&#964 and Koshy uses alpha (&#945.

phi
Dunlap-65 Vajda uses –σ(***little 'o' like thingy...***) , and Dunlap uses –φ (***phi***) and Koshy uses –β(***not sure what it is... sorta like a "b"***>

Beware! Dunlap occasionally uses φ (***phi***) to represent our phi = 0.61803.., but more frequently he uses φ (***phi***) to represent -0.618033...
http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibFormulae.html#gs

Well then?

... I don't what to seem [insert the word I'm looking for here], but, ...

AK, this is your entry. You have to do the hard work of deciding what way you want it presented. Once you have decided, you have to defend your decision. Do you think the entry is ready to be published? If so, let us know and I'll have a look at it again.

I think it's ready to be published as soon as I've established what symbols to use for Phi and phi. concidering that apparently there are no established symbols, it seems it would be all right to just use Φ and &phi, or really any two symbols (out of those that others have used)

The more mathematical entries on the web seem to go along with Martin Gardner and call it φ when using a symbol but use the word phi as a proper word, with a capital P at the beginning of sentences and a lower-case p the rest of the time. The Wolfram site (author of the package Mathematica) uses φc for the reciprocal of phi without giving it a name in English. The c stands for conjugate.