

Search for your name in pi - tokenadult
http://www.dr-mikes-maths.com/pisearch.html

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mapleoin
_Because the number "10" keeps appearing in the denominator, we say this is pi
in "base 10". It is also why we have 10 different digits._

I thought we have 10 digits so we can count our fingers.

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bdhe
Also, every number system is base "10" in its own system :-)

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syaz1
That's profound.

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sylvinus
This is indeed the coolest thing:

 _The first English word in pi is... wait for it... PI, coming in at position
18. Now isn't that cute?_

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brlewis
That argues for using base 27 better than the article does.

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Jun8
This is one of those silly things that you just can't stop playing with.

    
    
      * "allah" isn't there but "jesus" is found twice!
      * "hate occurs more than "love"
    

Just as I was really excited about the mystical possibilities here, I came
across this party pooper:
[http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there-
ar...](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there-are-no-
hidden-messages-in-pi)

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tokenadult
To accompany this, a link to a wonderful article about π by one of the leading
researchers on the number π, an article I share with my students each year on
π day.

[http://www.nieuwarchief.nl/serie5/deel01/sep2000/pdf/borwein...](http://www.nieuwarchief.nl/serie5/deel01/sep2000/pdf/borwein.pdf)

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jtolle
I am now going to lock myself in the bathroom until I can prove that pi + e is
irrational. I mean, how hard can it be?

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gjm11
Very, very, very hard.

You almost certainly know that already, so here are a couple more remarks just
for fun:

One useful technique when making pseudorandom number generators is to take two
not-so-good RNGs and combine their outputs (e.g., adding them or XORing them).
If the two RNGs have different enough "structure", the combined generator can
have much better statistical properties than either of its two components. The
fact that it's much harder to prove anything about pi+e than about pi or e
individually is rather like that.

But even proving that pi is irrational is highly nontrivial. (Proving that e
is irrational, on the other hand, is a fairly easy exercise. Sketch: suppose e
= p/q; then q!e is an integer; but q!e is the sum of a series whose terms are
initially integers and then abruptly positive numbers small enough that their
sum has to be between 0 and 1; contradiction.)

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jtolle
How awesome would it be if pi + e _were_ found to be rational? Maybe
everything starts cancelling out past the zillionth digit...

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alttag

      > Your chances:
      >   3 or fewer letters: about 100% 
      >   7 or more letters: about 0%.
    

While this might be true for the set he's calculated, doesn't an infinite
sequence of non-repeating digits suggest the likelihood of every sequence
approaches one as the number of digits are calculated approaches infinity?

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yequalsx
No! Consider this number:

0.101001000100001..... (continue the obvious pattern)

This number is irrational but there is an obvious pattern to the digits. The
pattern is not random. It's an open question on whether or not the digits of
pi are randomly distributed. If so then what you write is correct.

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cabacon
Doesn't the difference between just being irrational (e.g., sqrt(2)) and being
transcendental (e.g., \pi, e) matter here?

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yequalsx
The claim I responded to had to do with the randomness of the digits of a
number. The person appeared to have the belief that irrational numbers have to
have random digits. This isn't true. This isn't true for transcendental
numbers either. The number I gave is transcendental but doesn't have random
digits.

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DanBC
That site has 30 million (base 27) digits of Pi. I used a dump of the first 5
trillion digits, and am now submitting prior art to all software patent
trolls.

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yahelc
This is, of course, bizarrely arbitrary, since its assuming there's any
underlying meaning to the ordering of the English alphabet (since, ya know,
there isn't).

