Wildcard (meta-variable?) for use in equations or something?

March 3, 2019 2:13 PM

Well, there's no proper category available... So when i was in high school, my classmate managed to come up with a number (something like 1.1452?) that could substitute any variable in this chapter of our either trigonometry or statistics class for either quadratic equations or logarithms if i remember excepting only a handful of instances but i forget what it was and he's unreachable. This's surely unhelpful but that's all i'm able to give if anybody's got even a remote clue as to what that might've been?
posted by Grease to Science & Nature (2 answers total)

Best answer: Sounds like you are mangling the square root of 2, which is 1.4142135 (and so on).

It's a generally useful number and comes up a lot, e.g. the A paper sizes (A4 etc) all use that as the aspect ratio because of its mathematical properties ( you can keep cutting the rectangle in half along the long side and the aspect ratio stays the same).
Another place you see it is on the aperture dial of a lens - you multiply by it to get the next stop.
posted by w0mbat at 2:22 PM on March 3, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: That very well seems to be it. thanks. He chose to be mischievous as to what source so i never thought it'd've been as simple as a square root of 2.
posted by Grease at 3:00 PM on March 3, 2019