I'm used to arguments that this or that word is actually "not a word". But I was surprised to see an analogous complaint about numbers that are allegedly not numbers, in Nadia Damouni, "Google bid 'pi' for Nortel patents and lost", Reuters 7/1/2011:
At the auction for Nortel Networks' wireless patents this week, Google's bids were mystifying, such as $1,902,160,540 and $2,614,972,128.
Math whizzes might recognize these numbers as Brun's constant and Meissel-Mertens constant, but it puzzled many of the people involved in the auction, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation on Friday.
"Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers," one of the sources said.
Read the rest of this entry »