this feels like some kind of factoring to me, but i don't know enough math to join That to This

@yatchi turns out not always :/ so it has to work for all real numbers

@jk @yatchi seems like you'd hit a problem with irrational real numbers if the mean is computed from integers? as that'd imply your mean is in Q, not R

@ninjawedding @jk yeah the average must be a rational number, you can't do this with an irrational number

@yatchi @ninjawedding accuracy isn't paramount so I can just truncate to a rational approximation anyway; it seems fairly workable

@jk @yatchi ah, gotcha

@jk @ninjawedding the shortest possible list will be produced by the best rational approximation which you can calculate with continued fractions

@yatchi @jk whoa, I haven't had an occasion to look continued fractions up in a *long* time. thanks for the pointers

@jk in any case, i think you get there by finding the sum and the number of integers that are in the list (and for any given sum you can trivially get a list by adding the right number of zeros. and work from there if you want one of the infinite other possibilities). if a/b is in simplest form then ab is the sum and b is the number of numbers required, because there is no smaller integer a/b can be multiplied by to produce an integer

@yatchi thanks this is helpful!

@jk oops i mean a is the sum

@jk so for 4.75 = 19/4 you need four numbers that sum to 19, and there is no way to do it with fewer than four

and then if you want to do it for a real number the problem is then finding a rational representation of it