Google Bid ‘Pi’ for Nortel Patents and Lost

Nadia Damouni, reporting for Reuters:

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. […]

“Either they were supremely confident or they were bored.”

★ Saturday, 2 July 2011