Tuesday, March 27, 2012
4/17 in excel. Does excel give us the real value?
for all the 1/17, 2/17, 3/17..... there are these same 16 digits in this order, they just all start in a different place.
When you do the actual division on paper you can see the pattern repeat when you do different fractions.
Then we looked at other numbers. Primes seem to have patterns? we looked at 13. There are a couple of patterns.
13 has some kind of pattern, but doesn't seem to act the same as 17 and 19. Why?
Remainders determine our rut, not the numbers we get in the answer when we divide.
Point of all this: asking a simple question like 4/17 in the presence of technology can lead to great discussions. Can help with understanding long division? Can help understand number theory, abstract algebra... in part because of the technology. We can take out the calculation part and just explore the patterns.