Re: [math-fun] geostationary glass fiber ring
At 01:04 PM 7/27/2015, Eugene Salamin via math-fun wrote:
What useful purpose would such a geostationary fiber serve?
I think radiation damage and solar wind are going to be bigger problems than orbital tension. Brent ----- Among other things, it would be the largest manmade structure ever built. (~ one light-second in circumference!) One could build a large radio telescope from the satellites & use the comms to synchronize it. Maybe its first use would be to study the radiation damage & solar wind effects to glass fibers in geosynchronous orbit. ;-) What purpose did the Great Pyramid serve?
Somewhere in cyberspace I found a cartoon of Homer Simpson at a blackboard with some math and physics equations on it, and one of them is (and I quote): 3987^12 + 4365^12 = 4472^12 . This is false, but Mma says the 1/12th root of the LHS is 4472.000000007+. Question: How does one find such approximate equalities? Is it just a question of running through all numbers x of form x = (K^12 + L^12)^(1/12) for 1 <= K, L <= 9999, and picking the x nearest to an integer? Or is it cleverer than that? —Dan
Have a look at Noam Elkies' 2000 article "Rational points near curves and small nonzero |x^3-y^2| via lattice reduction": http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0005139
participants (3)
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Dan Asimov -
Hans Havermann -
Henry Baker