Pi q

Nice visualisations of Pi. Thanks.

I like the walking pi

Oli you've made my day

Chai how about pi in the ski

My pleasure. I even learnt that there is place in Pi with 6 consecutive "9"... And that Pi includes all the patterns in the universe, which is very counter-intuitive but i am chewing on it...

(like, does Pi include an entire numeric version of Proust's Recherche du Temps Perdu, AND of Marquez' 100 Years of Solitudes, AND of all Shakespeare's plays?)

Yea Oli, I wonder too

...also wonder how they know

The argument is that the series of numbers needed to write Pi is infinite in length and contains an infinite number of patterns.

From there to including ALL the possible and existing patterns in the universe, i think there's a non sequitur.

It's like the monkey and the typewriter thing. Given enough time, people say, it would produce "all of Shakespeare". If there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably minute.

That article linked to in the first post contains much hocus-pocus, for example "... the place where six 9s occur in a row. Called the Feynman Point, the repetition appears much earlier than probability would dictate."

There is no evidence that Richard Feynman ever referred to this point in the expansion of pi, and the idea that it occurs "earlier than probability would dictate" is just nonsense. For what it's worth (not very much IMHO) The number τ (tau), or 2 x pi, has a string of 7 consecutive 9s starting from digit 761.

Let's not forget "Contact" the 1985 book by Carl Sagan (an atheist) where he has God hide a message in the expansion of pi.

I agree that the idea that the 6 9s come "earlier than probability would dictate" is nonsense. If it was a lotery (which it isn't), that series of 6 9s would have the exact same probability of appearing than any other series of 6 numbers, eg 936791.

Oli, how do we know that follows

It doesn't follow. There are infinite orders of infinity.

Just because a particular set or series -- in this case, all the numbers used to write down Pi in decimal notation, let's call it A -- is infinite doesn't mean it's the same size as another infinite set -- in this case all the patterns in the universe, let's call this set B.

In addition, Pi IS a pattern of this universe, and therefore A belongs to B. So intuitively A is smaller than B.

Oli yes that makes perfect sense but doesn't it make even more unlikely finding in it the works of Shakespeare, or even 16 consecutive zeroes

16 consecutive zeros should be in there somewhere. The work of Shakespeare (or of Stephen King for that matter), no way.