A counting method for finding rational approximates to arbitrary order roots of integers
Ashok Kumar Gupta, Ashok Mittal · arXiv (Cornell University) · 1999
It is shown that for finding rational approximates to m'th root of any integer to any accuracy one only needs the ability to count and to distinguish between m different classes of objects. To every integer N can be associated a 'replacement rule' that generates a word W* from another word W consisting of symbols belonging to a finite 'alphabet' of size m. This rule applied iteratively on almost any initial word W0, yields a sequence of words {Wi} such that the relative frequency of different symbols in the word Wi approaches powers of the m'th root of N as i tends to infinity