This is a guest post, sent in by David, who’s discovered an interesting property of numbers, and is looking for collaborators to take it further.
Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
– W. S. Anglin
A few years ago I saw a post on a website that showed that the inverse of 998,001 produces a decimal expansion that counts, using three digit strings, from 000 to 997 without error.
\[ \frac{1}{998,\!001} = 0.0000010020030040050060070080090100110120130\ldots \]
I immediately thought that this had to be a hoax. I decided to work it out to prove it was a hoax – after all some people put anything they want on the web whether it is true or not.