I like pi
Who doesn't like pi?
Joe sent me this a little while ago. Apparently, my surname appears in the first four billion binary digits of pi, as does Joe's (plus a little extra). What are the chances? Well, assuming that pi was normal (it's not), according to the chart on the main page, 11% for the former and about 0.0003% for the latter.
I don't know why Joe decided to google hex pi, but there you go.
Edit: A correction: according to one of the papers on the site above, pi is "widely believed" to be normal, and the paper in question further discusses proving that pi (and some other constants) is normal base-2. I'm not certain if they prove it in the paper or if it's left a question, based on my brief inspection, but in any case it looks like my claim that pi is not normal was probably baseless, and quite possibly erroneous.
Joe sent me this a little while ago. Apparently, my surname appears in the first four billion binary digits of pi, as does Joe's (plus a little extra). What are the chances? Well, assuming that pi was normal (it's not), according to the chart on the main page, 11% for the former and about 0.0003% for the latter.
I don't know why Joe decided to google hex pi, but there you go.
Edit: A correction: according to one of the papers on the site above, pi is "widely believed" to be normal, and the paper in question further discusses proving that pi (and some other constants) is normal base-2. I'm not certain if they prove it in the paper or if it's left a question, based on my brief inspection, but in any case it looks like my claim that pi is not normal was probably baseless, and quite possibly erroneous.