Today’s science blog is about pi!

But why? It’s not pi day or casual pi day or tau day.

Well, because today’s date occurs in pi as well: at position 336 (not counting the “3.”). In fact, you can easily find if any sequence occurs in pi (and if so, where) using this cool tool:

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery (searches the first 200,000,000 digits).

Anyway.

I found that cool site by reading an article by the Mathematician at askamathematician.com. The question asked was, “Since pi is infinite, do its digits contain all finite sequences of numbers?”

The answer: while pi is infinite and does not contain an infinitely repeating sequence, it has yet to be proven that every digit from 0-9 occurs an unlimited umber of times in pi’s decimals. Thus, it hasn’t been determined that pi contains every single finite sequence of numbers.

However, though pi isn’t random, its digits appear to show up randomly in sequence such that any given chunk of pi has approximately equal numbers of digits 0 through 9 (I tried this out, it’s true!), which indicates that if that’s the case throughout and pi is indeed infinite, then according to the Mathematician, “there is a probability of 100% that such a number contains each and every finite sequences of digits, and pi has the appearance of being statistically random.”