I saw this piece about how 1/1998 was approximated by series of powers of 2, which raised the question, "Can Mathematica help confirm this?" (of course it can!)
First, a gut check to see the decimal expansion
N[1/9998, 100]
which shows
0.00010002000400080016003200640128025605121024204840968193638727745549 \
10982196439287857571514302860572114
(if you don't specify the 100 in the argument to N[], it will show you just 0.00010002 by default)
This can be visualized as
0.0001 +
0.00000002 +
0.000000000004 +
0.0000000000000008 +
0.00000000000000000016 +
...
0.000000000000000000000000000000000256 +
...
All right, so we do see these powers of 2! They seem to be in "groups" – 0004, 0016, 1024 and so on.
So we want to check if something like 2^i/10000^i can add up to this number.
Parallelize[
Table[1/9998 - Total[Table[2^i/10000^i, {i, 1, n}]], {n, 1, 10000}] ]
I initially tried this without Parallelize[], but that kept going for a while, so I had to abort it (Evaluation->Abort Evaluation) and try this version instead.
Anyway, so this whirs for a while. As this htop output shows, it really does use as many cores as possible.
{% img center http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5504/122279410344ce9d69db4z_d.jpg %}
Eventually when it's done, we can ListPlot it.
ListPlot[%118, Frame -> True, FrameStyle -> Black,
PlotRange -> { {1, 10000}, {-0.000105, -0.000095} }]
{% img center http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5535/12227532975ee70979b52z_d.jpg %}
As this graph shows, the result is remarkably close to a constant value of -0.0001 !!