All programs manipulate symbols. All bits are is symbols.
It's just sometimes we use those symbols to represent a subset of the integers (e..g. with the popular binary notation)... or a subset of the rationals (e.g. with the popular floating point notation)... or a subset of the reals that happens to include a transcendental number because we decided that some symbol (or combination of symbols) represents some particular transedental number.
That is a symbolic manipulation. Wherever it comes down to actual numbers, you use adequate approximations to infinite summations for x and iy. Even nominally exact rational values are often idealizations of measurements: your house has no actual right angles, but eh, close enough.
e and pi arise in axiomatic systems we use to approximate our world. They never appear in nature. They do appear in formulas we find to approximate details of our world.
I say "actual numbers" to mean "numbers that refer to actual quantities or measures that can be taken". You might calculate that a stick must be exactly 1/pi meters long, but you will make the stick no better than 113/355 meters long.
I probably confused matters with my undefined expression "actual numbers".
e and pi are as actual as i or 0.
I think Turing introduced "computable numbers" which are a lot like the reals, but countable. You can write a program that produces each. So it includes integers, rationals, polynomic irrationals, and lots of transcendentals. But the set any particular person (or computer) operates on over the course of their existence is not just countable, but finite and not very large. You have to have expressed a representation of each in it at least once. We can only express a small number of numbers over the course of a life. Computers can do more of them. You might claim all those that programs you wrote have expressed.
And, of course, the number has to have finite expression. Representing pi as a summation is finite. But presenting a numerical computation involving it has to be an approximation if it ever to finish.
How is "The circumferance of an idealized circle divided by its diameter" not a finite expression of π? Saying something cannot be expressed finitely in an integer-based numeral system, and saying that it admits no finite representation are two radically different statements.
Despite it being a non-starter from a pragmatic standpoint, we could for instance easily imagine a novel numeral type that encodes the set S = {a + b·π where a and b are integers} (we can encode integers quite easily and all we need to reposesent such a number in silico is to encode a and b). Using such a numeral type, we are able to do exact arithmetic if our operations are restricted to addition and subtraction (and if we are content with fractional representation of numbers as being considered "exact", we can also do division and multiplication although we would have to work within the larger set S' = { (a + b·π) / (c + d·π) where, a, b, c, and d are integers and c·d ≠ 0} rather than within S).
I don't think you have to be a Platonist to allow that numbers that do not exactly correspond to humanly measurable quantities can yet be part of a calculation.
Another example would be Binet's formula for Fibonacci n[1], which though it involves Phi, sqrt(5), etc., always evaluates to an integer, given integer n.
The existence of these irrationals in Platonic heaven doesn't follow from the formula, which afaik depends only on the usual rules of algebra and logic, though I admit I'm not sure what constructivists make of this type of calculation.
It feels to me like you're redefining what a number is to be very different to what anyone with a maths background would say a number is. Essentially you're saying that neither e nor pi are numbers?
The only numbers that may exist in nature are the non-negative rationals. Negative numbers are widely useful, but they don't exist in any meaningful way: they're an abstraction over reality. Irrational numbers definitely don't exist, and don't get me started on so-called "imaginary" numbers -- they're no less present in nature than the negative numbers are.
But the concepts are useful, and the symbols have meaning. The article mentions normal words having different meanings in mathematical language, and that impacts even every-day use of maths.
. . . and then I start thinking about that damn Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula.
Although ( handwave ) all the transcendentalness is magically manipulated away leaving a simple computation for the immediate reveal of any arbitrary n-th (hexadecimal) digit of π
You have an abstract definition of a sequence of digits, and an algorithm that reveals an actual digit from among them. It is surprising that you don't need to approximate an infinite series to get it, but everybody agrees that digit would show up there if you did one. You would still need to do an infinite amount of work to get the rest of them.
It is magic of a kind by wizards of a kind, or anyway indistinguishable from it.
Just to be clear, for any third party spectators, the surprise isn't that more work is required to get more digits .. the WTF moment for some is that no matter how large N is there's no need to do an increasing amount of work as N grows (there's no cost to "skipping to (not quite) the end").
It's another of those intuition challenging moments in math.
