Every Fifth Real Number is Evil
Doron Zeilberger
Published: 2025/10/4
Abstract
Fifteen years ago, then-Carleton-undergrad Isaac Hodes, proved that the Golden Ratio is evil. In this modest contribution to human knowledge, we show that in fact, every fifth real number is evil, and we present lots of other interesting numbers that are evil. We also show (in addition to many other fascinating facts), that the expected evil-location of a random evil number is 148.185185185185185... . It follows that the Golden Ratio is a fairly average evil real number, since, as first computed by Hodes, the evil location of the Golden Ratio is 146.