ii
Abstract
I investigate the normality of algebraic irrational numbers, specifically by
analyzing their
χ
2
,
2
χ
2
and Kolmogorov-Smirnov distributions.
I analyze
39
Pisot numbers,
47
Salem numbers and the roots of
15
randomlygenerated polynomials with integer coefficients, all computed to
5
bases with
a precision of 2
·
3
18
≈
2
29.5
bits (about
233
million decimals).
I show that the frequencies of the digit sequences tested are equidistributedwith a confidence value of
5
%. Specifically, digit sequences of size
10
in bases
2
and
3
, size
7
in base
5
, size
6
in base
7
and size
5
in base
10
are equallyfrequent. This result is true for all
101
numbers. I show that no pattern can be found in the statistical anomalies and that only few anomalies survive a
prefix size of 2
·
3
18
≈
2
29.5
.
The results lend credence to Borel’s conjecture that all algebraic irrationals
are normal in all bases.
Furthermore, popular root finding algorithms are discussed and their per-formance when computing roots to arbitrary precision compared. Specifically,
I give a comparison of Newton’s, Laguerre’s and Gupta-Mittal’s methods
using MPSolve as reference. The results show that Newton’s and Laguerre’s
methods are much faster than the competition. Gupta-Mittal is shown to
reduce to the classical Power Method, faster than MPsolve, but much slower
than Newton’s and Laguerre’s methods. Gupta-Mittal appears to be unsuited,
while Laguerre’s method shows great performance.The full paper, including all tables, is available at (
550
pages):
http://project-roots.s3.amazonaws.com/brinchj-2009_roots.pdf
The source code produced during the project is available at:
http://project-roots.s3.amazonaws.com/source-code.zip
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