Now, if I were thinking of people to ask this question of, one of the first would be John McKay. You must be younger than I thought, cos I wdve sworn you were at the 2nd Atlas conference in 1969. Perhaps you were, but were too impecuious to register officially. You would know better than I if there is any connexion with Harold Stark's classic An explanation of some exotic continued fractions found by Brillhart, Computers in Number Theory, Academic Press, 1971, 21--35. Presumably this is no random cubic, and you must have been looking at it for some reason. Its discriminant is pretty smooth, -45384624 = -2^4 * 3^7 * 1297 with the only non-smooth factor = 2^4 * 3^4 + 1 On the other hand, if you have enough monkeys and enough typewriters you'll eventually finish up with the works of Shakespeare. Why were you looking at it in the first place, and why did you go so far? R. On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 MCKAY@vax2.concordia.ca wrote:

The real root of x*x*x - 156*x + 817

has a very large term round about the 800th position.

Is there any explanation for this? It is of the order of 10**7.

John McKay