A Procedure to Compute the Digit Sequence of a Rational Number

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
This Demonstration visualizes a procedure for generating the base 2-digit sequence for the rational number ,
,
. From A New Kind of Science, p. 139: "The idea is to have a number
which essentially keeps track of the remainder at each step in the division. One starts by setting
equal to
. Then at each step, one compares the values of
and
. If
is less than
, the digit generated at that step is 0, and
is replaced by
. Otherwise,
is replaced by
. With this procedure, the value of
is always less than
. And as a result, the digit sequence obtained always repeats at most every
steps." On the left, the
row shows the binary digits of
at the
step in the algorithm, and on the right, the binary digits of
are shown vertically. Black cells represent 1's, and gray cells represent 0's.
Contributed by: Abigail Nussey (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA