How to Use irrational number in a Sentence
irrational number
noun-
Many people may have an irrational number in mind, such as pi (π), Euler’s number (e) or the square root of 2.
—Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 3 Mar. 2023
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But no matter how fine the grid, the ninth dot always falls between grid points; it is forced to correspond to an irrational number.
—Quanta Magazine, 22 Sep. 2015
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This irrational number shows up in the craziest places.
—Rhett Allain, Wired, 13 Mar. 2020
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Something the Pythagoreans couldn’t deal with: an irrational number; that is, a number that can’t be written as a fraction (or ratio).
—Avery Hurt, Discover Magazine, 24 Sep. 2022
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Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction.
—Avery Hurt, Discover Magazine, 14 Mar. 2021
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And on this day, math enthusiasts around the world celebrate the irrational number.
—Francisco Guzman and Saeed Ahmed, CNN, 14 Mar. 2020
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An irrational number is one that cannot be expressed by a fraction of integers, or whole numbers.
—Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 11 May 2018
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This distinguishes it again from more familiar irrational numbers like the square root of two (whose second power is equal to two).
—Dan Rockmore /, NBC News, 14 Mar. 2018
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Math enthusiasts and plenty of students know all about the day that celebrates the irrational number that never ends.
—Alexandra Meeks, CNN, 13 Mar. 2022
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Next, choose two angle measurements that are an irrational number of degrees (that is, any number of degrees, like pi, that can’t be written as a fraction).
—Quanta Magazine, 26 Aug. 2021
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It’s pi, the ever-repeating irrational number expressed as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius.
—Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 22 July 2022
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With an irrational number, those nested layers will go on forever.
—Popular Mechanics, 21 Feb. 2021
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The short way to say this is that pi is an irrational number, one that cannot be represented as a fraction and thus has an infinite and never-repeating decimal expansion.
—Dan Rockmore /, NBC News, 14 Mar. 2018
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Continued fractions for an irrational number, like Pi, go on ad infinitum.
—Popular Mechanics, 21 Feb. 2021
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But to the brothers’ dismay Hippasus proved that the side of a square has no common measure with its diagonal, and consequently some magnitudes—known as irrational numbers—cannot...
—Amir Alexander, WSJ, 7 June 2019
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The vast majority are irrational numbers, never-ending decimals that cannot be written as fractions.
—Wired, 18 Aug. 2019
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Real examples and applications are messy, with ugly roots made of decimals or irrational numbers.
—Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 6 Dec. 2019
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Making matters worse, the golden ratio is another irrational number!
—Steven Salzberg, Forbes, 18 Apr. 2022
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This irrational number, which begins 1.618, is found in certain spirals, golden rectangles and now the relative speeds of two mysterious stellar processes.
—Quanta Magazine, 10 Mar. 2015
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In 1837 the mathematician Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet found a rule for how well irrational numbers can be approximated by rational ones.
—Wired, 18 Aug. 2019
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The special occasion was first commemorated back in 1988, when physicist Larry Shaw organized the holiday in San Francisco to honor the infinite, irrational number that has been utilized in mathematics and science for thousands of years.
—Dave Quinn, PEOPLE.com, 8 Mar. 2022
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Consider a quest to approximate various irrational numbers.
—Leila Sloman, Scientific American, 16 Sep. 2019
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Continued fractions are approximations; as the height of the tower of numerators and denominators grows, the continued fraction approximation gets closer to the irrational number being approximated.
—Evelyn Lamb, Popular Mechanics, 23 Feb. 2021
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'irrational number.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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