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

I'm subscribed too. It's like being one of Arthur's Knights, this. Wow. England's Need or what?

OK. Cool series too.

Not going to be 1, is it? Just 2 terms is root of something >1, which itself must be >1. Then it keeps growing.

After that I resorted to calculator brutality. I doubt it's going to be reducable to a finite series. Does it converge? Probably. In fact yes, rather quickly. Onto a number that doesn't look at all familiar. To 10 places of decimals, it's 1.7579327556.

I have no idea what this number is. I thought for a minute it might be the square root of pi, but it's about 2% light.

Interesting, Pin

I just tried to generate the series as you did, and got the same result, which is at odds with the published result I have in front of me (It's a well-known mathematical problem, first published in 1911). I'll investigate further...

While you wait, there's DD's puzzle to finish...

Recapping DD's actual question:

The 42nd PM of Britain
About whom no hootoo entry is written
But from a link tenuous
Through a project in genesis
If two eastenders don't lead to which fictional creation?

Got as far as Eden as PM and a large Cornish greenhouse, but we still need the eastenders and the fictional creation. If you read the last 30-odd posts of backthread, you'll get all the nuances.

Come on everybody. Let's resurrect an institution

Hi Icy

Try Googling that number. Or even this number...

1.7579327566180045327088196382181385
276531999221468377043101355003851102
326744467575723445540002594529709324
718478269567252864058677411085461154
351167459748276498

(I broke it up with returns to avoid the howls of derision that go with page layout disruption)

Better yet, try this link:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SomossQuadraticRecurrenceConstant.html

It gives the 1911 series (Ramanujan's) too, so you can see where you got confused

To be fair we were so close to getting my answer I just don't believe that nobody has come up with it yet.

Nothing to do with the Eden project is it?

Queen Victoria?

You know every time I come back here I feel way out of my intellectual depth, so to speak.

Evil bunch of clever clogses.

<...so you can see where you got confused>

Well spotted, Pin. I'll say in my defence that I reproduced a misprint in the Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Numbers. This is what happens when I try to think one up on the spot.

Just to summarise, it's a famous mathematical problem, posed by the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan in 1911. He received no replies, and his proof would probably be unintelligible to you and me, so I'll just state the result - it's 3.

The trouble is, I typed the wrong series (bloody penguins!)

The correct sequence which converges to exactly 3 is:

SQRT(1 + 2*SQRT(1 + 3*SQRT(1 + 4*SQRT(1 + ... [to infinity]

These sums of infinite series may look a bit academic, but they have an applied use in calculating approximate values for functions, as you would need to do in calculators and computers. I have one which will calculate pi to one million places in just 19 iterations. I'll see if there's an edited entry in it...


Back to DD's puzzle...

Bea as point up further up the thread Eden project has been confirmed already as one link in the chain to the anwer.

Mr Whale the Queen Vic is a fictional pub not a person.

TBH you are only one more bit, a yard, nay a foot, away from making the final connection to the peron in question.

OK, let's try some blindingly obvious. Nobody's mentioned Steinbeck yet. His 'East of Eden' is a fictional creation, and also a reinterpretation of the Cain and Abel story. Hence the title

Taking gravely backward steps there Pin.

. . . and suddenly they stopped

Such a shame this one died. I came to it late, but this and 'Another quiz' were my favourite threads for a while (There's a link to both on my PS)

That's where I saw it

Nice to see it here again. What was the question?

Seems to be

The 42nd PM of Britain
About whom no hootoo entry is written
But from a link tenuous
Through a project in genesis
If two eastenders don't lead to which fictional creation?

And it seems that Eden was the 42nd PM, and that links to Genesis. But I don't know my Eastenders; is one called Gar and another Den?

There certainly was one called Den, but how does this make a fictional creation?