Why do we need to distinguish between rational and irrational numbers? What’s the importance of knowing where they fall between the two?
In: Mathematics
Most (almost all) of the real numbers are irrational. Now this doesn’t concern your average day if you don’t work in certain fields, but it is essential in math, and therefore in science and engineering. Rational based polynoms lead out of the rationals, even out of the reals, but you definitely need irrational numbers to have a complete number line.
Interestingly, despite their abundance, proving that a number is indeed irrational is usually not easy.
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