Problem:
Define a sequence as follows:
(The positive divisors of include 1 as well as .) Let be the real number whose decimal expansion contains in the -th place, . Determine, with proof, whether is rational or irrational.
Problem:
Define a sequence as follows:
(The positive divisors of include 1 as well as .) Let be the real number whose decimal expansion contains in the -th place, . Determine, with proof, whether is rational or irrational.
Solution:
We show that is irrational. Suppose that is rational. Then the sequence is periodic after some stage; there exist natural numbers such that for all . Choose such that and is a perfect square. Let
be the prime decompositions of so that is even for . Now take a prime different from . Consider and . Since is divisible by , we have . Hence and have same parity. But , since and is a prime. Since is a square, is odd. It follows that is even and hence . This contradiction implies that is irrational.
Alternative Solution:
As earlier, assume that is rational and choose natural numbers such that for all . Consider the numbers , where is any number. This must contain at least one . Otherwise for all . But if and only if is a square. Hence it follows that there are no squares for , which is absurd. Thus every consecutive terms of the sequence must contain a after certain stage. Let , and consider and . Since there are no squares between and , we conclude that for . But then, we have consecutive terms of the sequence which miss , contradicting our earlier observation.