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Why Pi Matters
- pronoiac 12y agoIn San Francisco, the Exploratorium offers free admission for Pi Day tomorrow. Yay, Pi Day!
- yeukhon 12y agoI believe, but correct me, in Pi, there is no repeating pattern known to exist yet. So you can encode information in Pi. No? I heard this from watching Person of Interest...
- acomar 12y agoThese are unrelated concepts and the latter is unproven but conjectured. Pi's irrationality is sufficient to show that there is no point after which the digits of pi lapse into cycles. However, it's conjuctured that pi is also a normal number[1]. The square root of 2 and e are also conjectured to be normal, though a proof again does not exist. It has been proven however that the vast majority of real numbers are infact normal, but the proof isn't constructive so specific examples largely elude us. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
- Chinjut 12y agoSpecific examples of normal numbers are super easy to construct. Here's one (in base 10): 0.01234567891011121314... [I am using "normal" to mean normal in a specific base, not necessarily normal in all bases (i.e., not necessarily "absolutely normal"). But this is all that is necessary for the idea of encoding information via the digit expansion of a constant]
- hobarrera 12y agoIt's really only "pi day" for a single country around the world that uses a notation that nobody else can understand (mediumUnit.smallestUnit.largestUnit). I'm also surprised that US still uses two-digits for years, as in "3.14.15", I though the changes brought by on Y2K had been worldwide.