Fund managers and bankers who have met him describe him as "a visionary leader", "a world-class CEO", "a superior intellect", and "a database that knows numbers down to two decimals".
Put another way, to predict the sequence in this particular case out to n terms, one must know the value of x0 to better than n/8 places of decimals.
Different systems, of course, have different measures of their "horizon of predictability," but all chaotic systems share the property that every extra place of decimals in one's knowledge of the starting point only pushes the horizon a small extra distance away.
Because the values of the functions are in general irrational numbers, they are entered in the table as decimals, rounded off at some convenient place.
Understanding the true nature of such infinite decimals lies at the heart of analysis.
The geometric approach had led Eudoxus in the 4th century bce to define them as approximations by rational numbers (e.g., a series of nonrepeating decimals, as √2 = 1.414213... ).
These numbers are the positive and negative infinite decimals (including terminating decimals that can be considered as having an infinite sequence of zeros on the end).
Earlier, the real numbers were described as infinite decimals, although such a description makes no logical sense without the formal concept of a limit.
ODDS: Find odds using Betfair.com – always write them as decimals.
For instance: "I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I'd ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems".
She had them try explaining to their partner how whole numbers differed from decimals.
