[Math] Special rational numbers that appear as answers to natural questions

big-listgm.general-mathematics

Motivation:

Many interesting irrational numbers (or numbers believed to be irrational) appear as answers to natural questions in mathematics. Famous examples are $e$, $\pi$, $\log 2$, $\zeta(3)$ etc. Many more such numbers are described for example in the wonderful book "Mathematical Constants" by Steven R. Finch.

The question:

I am interested in theorems where a "special" rational number makes a surprising appearance as an answer to a natural question. By a special rational number I mean one with a large denominator (and preferably also a large numerator, to rule out numbers which are simply the reciprocals of large integers, but I'll consider exceptions to this rule). Please provide examples.

For illustration, here are a couple of nice examples I'm aware of:

  1. The average geodesic distance between two random points of the Sierpinski gasket of unit side lengths is equal to $\frac{466}{885}$. This is also equivalent to a natural discrete math fact about the analysis of algorithms, namely that the average number of moves in the Tower of Hanoi game with $n$ disks connecting a randomly chosen initial state to a randomly chosen terminal state with a shortest number of moves, is asymptotically equal to $\frac{466}{885}\times 2^n$. See here and here for more information.

  2. The answer to the title question of the recent paper ""The density of primes dividing a term in the Somos-5 sequence" by Davis, Kotsonis and Rouse is $\frac{5087}{10752}$.

Rules:

1) I won't try to define how large the denominator and numerator need to be to for the rational number to qualify as "special". A good answer will maximize the ratio of the number's information theoretic content to the information theoretic content of the statement of the question it answers. (E.g., a number like 34/57 may qualify if the question it answers is simple enough.) Really simple fractions like $3/4$, $22/7$ obviously do not qualify.

2) The question the number answers needs to be natural. Again, it's impossible to define what this means, but avoid answers in the style of "what is the rational number with smallest denominator solving the Diophantine equation [some arbitrary-sounding, unmotivated equation]".

Edit: a lot of great answers so far, thanks everyone. To clarify my question a bit, while all the answers posted so far represent very beautiful mathematics and some (like Richard Stanley's and Max Alekseyev's answers) are truly astonishing, my favorite type of answers involve questions that are conceptual in nature (e.g., longest increasing subsequences, tower of Hanoi, Markov spectrum, critical exponents in percolation) rather than purely computational (e.g., compute some integral or infinite series) and to which the answer is an exotic rational number. (Note that someone edited my original question changing "exotic" to "special"; that is fine, but "exotic" does a better job of signaling that numbers like 1/4 and 2 are not really what I had in mind. That is, 2 is indeed quite a special number, but I doubt anyone would consider it exotic.)

Best Answer

We have $$\int\limits_0^\infty {\frac{{\sin x}}{x}dx} = \int\limits_0^\infty {\frac{{\sin x}}{x}\frac{{\sin \left( {{x/3}} \right)}}{{{x/3}}}dx} = \ldots = \int\limits_0^\infty {\frac{{\sin x}}{x}\cdots\frac{{\sin \left( {{x/{13}}} \right)}}{{{x/{13}}}}dx} = \frac{\pi }{2}$$

But $$\int\limits_0^\infty {\frac{{\sin x}}{x}\cdots\frac{{\sin \left( {{x/{15}}} \right)}}{{{x/{15}}}}dx} = \frac{{467807924713440738696537864469}}{{935615849440640907310521750000}} \cdot \pi$$

See http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1011497229317