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Pi Day! [EvolutionBlog]
Today’s date is March 15, 2015. That’s 3/14/15. That’s the first five digits of pi! And if you’re using 12-hour time, then you have two chances to be reading this at 9:26:53. That’s the first ten digits of pi! Oh happy day!
And a welcome chance to stick a thumb in the eye of all those buzzkills who would prefer we celebrate tau day instead.
Since pi is an infinite, nonrepeating decimal whose digits, so far as anyone can tell, are statistically random, we might wonder if every ten-digit sequence of digits appears somewhere in its decimal expansion. If the answer is yes, then any combination of date and time can be thought of as pi day (until we get to October 10, of course, when we would need to start looking at eleven-digit sequences.) It is known that most real numbers are normal, meaning that every finite sequence of digits of a given length appears with the same frequency as every other sequence of the same length. This would imply that every finite sequence of digits appears somewhere in the decimal expansion of a normal number. Alas, it is not known if pi is among the “most,” or is instead one of the exceptions.
As it happens, a few years back I wrote a post for the Oxford University Press blog on the subject of pi. So go have a look!
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2015/03/14/pi-day/
