π notes
π notes
Short reads about π, for the curious, the classroom and the back row.
- The Feynman point and other weird places in πSix 9s in a row at decimal 762, a zero that is late for its own party, and why streaks that look impossible are exactly what randomness looks like.
- From Archimedes to 100 trillion digits, a short historyPolygons in Syracuse, a record that stood for 900 years, a mistake that went unnoticed for decades and a computer that ran for 157 days: the race for π's digits.
- Couples, besties and name fights, the maths of how far apart we areWhy short names win name fights, why the gap between two names is usually about as big as their depth, and why a distance in π says nothing about your love life.
- How we search 100 billion digits in a blinkThe trick behind Hidden in π: we read every digit once, in advance, and wrote the answers in one enormous table. Here is how that table works.
- Is every number really in π? Normality, honestlyYou have heard that π contains every phone number and every birthday. Maybe it does. Here is what mathematicians have proved, and what they only strongly suspect.
- Life of Pi, and the boy who chalked π on the blackboardYann Martel's novel and Ang Lee's film about a boy called Pi, why a never-ending number suits his story, and why your own name is probably in π too.
- Pi Day classroom ideas, with a printable worksheetFive activities for 14 March that need nothing but string, paper plates and a browser, plus a worksheet you can print straight from this page.
- The idea that started this site, with thanks to The Rest Is ScienceHow one podcast conversation about phone numbers in π turned into a search of 100 billion digits, and a thank-you to the show that started it.
- Why your phone number is (probably) in πThe maths behind our favourite figure, 99.995%: how a lottery, a ten-sided dice and the number e explain why almost every phone number turns up in the digits we search.