Text

Three, One, Four, One, Five, and On
The numbers recount their endless tale.
Three - Barefoot green, a silent voice.
White as hunger, One is twice
Bright like babies’ eyes.
Four is timid, envious of E.
Five, Punctuation or a pregnant sigh
Precedes proud Nine, colour of falling night.
Two, an unfastened knot,
A wayward wind, the hollow of Six resounding.
Nearby, Eight, a cloud of fireflies above a lake
Over which I skim Sevens
Remembering that Zero is nothing but a circle.

Pi Poem, Daniel T AMMET, 2009

Daniel Tammet (born January 31,1979) is an English writer, essayist, translator, and autistic scientist. He holds the European record for reciting $\pi$ from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes on March 14th 2004.

Questions

1. Use your calculator to work out $\pi-3.14$ and $22/7-\pi$ correct to 5 dp.
2. Daniel Tammet chose to recite $\pi$ on Pi Day: March 14 th (3rd month 14th day). Why do you think some mathematicians believe Pi Day should be July 22nd?
1. To this day more than 22 trillion digits of $\pi$ have been discovered. An average person can read out approximately 120 digits/min. Keeping this pace, how long would it take to recite these digits?
2. Assuming a total world population of roughly 7 billion people, how many digits of $\pi$ would everyone have to memorize in order to preserve all known digits of $\pi$?
1. Let's view $\pi$ as a big, random string of numbers. The odds of finding a string of digits in the first 100 million digits of $\pi$ are:
 String length Chances of finding 1-5 6 7 8 9 10 11 100% nearly 100% 99.995% 63% 9.5% 0.995% 0.09995%
1. If we search for the digit “6” in $\pi$, what is the chance that a digit picked at random in the first 100 million decimals of $\pi$ is equal to “6”?
2. If we search for the string of digits “61” in $\pi$, what is the chance that a string of two digits picked at random in the first 100 million decimals of $\pi$ is equal to “61”?

Vocabulary

• wayward: capricieux
• dp (decimal places): décimales