Once I read a magazine article about probability where the author stated there was an unlikely event. The probability was given as
(1 - 10-21)1025
This probability is pretty small but hard to get a handle on. It is, however, quite close to 10-n, where n is an integer.
Find this integer.
(1-1/x)^x tends to 1/e as x increases so (1-10^-21)^(10^21) is very very close to e.
Rewrite the expression as (1/e)^(10^4) = e^-10000
Need to use a base-10 logarithm to manage this.
log(e^-10000)=-10000log(e)=-4342.9448
So the expression is quite close to 10^-4343
n=4343
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Posted by Jer
on 2019-02-21 14:38:02 |