Talk:Six nines in pi

message: The page does not properly display at page resolutions under about 1000px of width. This is because the image is floating to the right, and the full digits of pi do not wrap next to it. Thus, the image covers up the digits. Anyone who can fix this, please do. --TechnoGuyRob 22:13, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem also occurs on high resolutions with a large font size.  I've factored the number of digits, and thus used blocks of 13 digits (using a table) so that the browser will automatically display as many blocks as it can on each line.  It needs to be checked on MS Internet Explorer, which I don't have.   — Lee J Haywood 22:47, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks, Lee. In Firefox, it messed up the last row for me with the spacing, so I added in a hack: I put white-colored zero's after the 9s. This isn't necessarily problematic, but definitely not desired, so anyone who knows a way that preserves both wrapping and spacing, please change the page accordingly. --TechnoGuyRob 00:57, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not everybody use graphical browsers and white backgrounds, and the zeros are confusing for those who can see them. I changed them to the actual digits of pi that come after the Feynman point. Henning Makholm 01:15, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Is there a reasoning underlying blocks of 13 digits? Or might it as well be 5, 10 or 20? Should it be reformatted?Proborc (talk) 09:47, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  There's no reason to reformat now; it looks fine. 13 digits is somewhat arbitrary (as 5, 10, or 20 would be), but I'll say it was a smart choice: 767=13×59, so using a block of 13 means the 99999 occurs at the end of a block. :) Shreevatsa (talk) 09:53, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reformatting 

message: The phrase 'consecutive numbers' is used consistently when what is meant is 'repeated numbers' or 'consecutive occurrences of the same number'.  Isn't there some better way to put this?
:Agreed. Changed to "identical" Sir Isaac Lime (talk) 14:04, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Sir Isaac, "consecutive" does not mean increasing like 1,2,3,4; it means digits that occur in adjacent positions. And simply saying "identical" digits does not make much sense — the "1" in the first decimal place is identical to the "1" in the third decimal place, but that is not what we care about in the article. Your edits have just made several sentences meaningless instead of confusing; I'll revert it for now and see what to do... probably "consecutive identical digits" is what we unfortunately need to use. Shreevatsa (talk) 14:30, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consecutive numbers 

message: Do you mean randomly chosen natural number?  An irrational number isn't guaranteed to have an equal chance of any particular digit sequence to occur -- it merely cannot be stated as the ratio of two whole numbers.  While it's not proven or known if pi itself is a natural number, it seems that if you are going to make a probabilistic analysis of it you should just go ahead and assume it is.  Otherwise, how will you what the expected values are?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.215.26.189 (talk) 14:50, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Since the set of numbers which are not normal has zero measure, I guess that with any "decent" probability distribution it is almost sure that you'd get a normal number. -- Army1987 – Deeds, not words. 13:47, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Randomly chosen Irrational number? 

message: The article calls these 9's an "intriguing coincidence" and states its probability of occurring at .08%. This is misleading, since it doesn't consider that Feynman would have noticed six 4's or six 7's, or for that matter seven 2's or five 6's. Once you add up all the probablilities of finding a series of repeated numbers somewhere near the beginning, it's hardly a coincidence at all.66.183.132.33 (talk) 06:21, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I understand your point, but what the article actually says is "the probability of six 9s occurring this early in the decimal representation is only 0.08%" (emphasis added).  This is a sourced quote, and to qualify it with our own observations would be contrary to Wikipedia's policy on original research.  Even considering that other repeats are possible, though, the Feynman point is still remarkable for how early it occurs – note, for example, that there are no runs of five or even four consecutive identical digits before the Feynman point.  Adrian J. Hunter(talk•contribs) 07:37, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  The chance of "141592" occurring early is small too, but happens right off the bat. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 02:49, 9 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  No, it's not 

message: Obviously enough, base ten is no "special snowflake", as the fact we prefer to use it more than likely merely stems from our anatomy. How about represetations of Pi in other bases, can we observe a similar phenomenon?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.70.16.131 (talk) 01:35, 24 December 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Nope. It's been tried. But you make a good point .... there are probably a lot of other coincidences like this out there in base 9, base 8, etc.... just not for pi specifically. —Soap— 12:23, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Would you have a source on that? This is fascinating, should be readily available, and yet my searches are spoilt by trivial questions about the transcendance of pi. 85.31.132.219 (talk) 17:39, 17 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other bases 

message: A 9x12 table layout seems highly irregular, with the added difficulty to easily find specific digit positions.  As a minimum, I'm sure with a slight mod to the text size, a 10x10 grouping would have fit the page.  Alternatively, the graphic at the top of the article could have been used, perhaps with modification into groupings of 10 digits rather than 5, with the bonus interactive capability of the mouse tag providing the specific digit position. SquashEngineer (talk) 13:24, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reformat Digital Expansion Table 

message: I have removed the jpeg illustration because (a) the text duplicates it, (b) it was color coded clear down to the two-digit pairs, creating a hard-to-read mess, and (c) it also showed results for "tau", a distraction that can imply to casual readers that there are two six-number strings in pi. 
Others, of course, may disagree. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 18:53, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks -- I had cleaned most of the silly tau references out of the text some time ago, but obviously missed that it was in the figure.  I agree with the removal on all grounds cited.  --JBL (talk) 20:22, 19 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illustration 

message: In a reversion of a recent edit,
:   and terminates at the 761st digit (which, in its terminating form, would be 5 instead of 4.) 
User:DavidWBrooks said that “Sorry, but that's not what it implies at all.”  But I think the reason for the reversion is incorrect, because that is exactly what “4999999 and so on” implies: 5 with a bunch of zeros ad infinitum.  (In math, the decimal numbers 0.49999999999999 ... and 0.5 are the same.) -- Roger Hui (talk) 14:48, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, the removed statement is correct. Maybe it can be reinstated as a footnote at least. Gap9551 (talk) 14:58, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it is correct - I misread it. I have returned it elsewhere in the article, as it seems to me to be more detail than we need to bring up on first reference about what the error implies.  - DavidWBrooks (talk) 15:10, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  I object to efforts to explain the joke in the absence of a secondary source that does so.  I suggest removing both the sentence the IP was editing and the new sentence.  (Many things logically follow from the false statement that pi is rational, but so what?) --JBL (talk) 15:42, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh, I don’t know; I think the new (current) sentence is harmless and perhaps even useful.  Useful in helping the non-cognoscenti “get” the joke.  (FYI: I did not do the reverted sentence nor the new sentence.) -- Roger Hui (talk) 15:51, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  4999999 v 5000000 

message: I have added a "definition needed" tag on "a randomly chosen normal number", since it is not clear to me what is the probability distribution the text is talking about. Is there a natural definition for normal numbers? The normal number page does say anything about it. --Lucha (talk) 22:04, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Randomly chosen normal number 

message: The article seems to contradict itself: "while strings of nine 9's next occur at position 590,331,982 and 640,787,382" vs "the positions of the first occurrence of a string of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 consecutive 9's in the decimal expansion are 5; 44; 762; 762; 762; 762; 1,722,776; 36,356,642; and 564,665,206, respectively". Does a sequence of 9 digits 9 appear both at the position 564,665,206 and 590,331,982, or did somebody miscount the digits (e.g. count EOL characters as well)? - Mike Rosoft (talk) 07:13, 17 April 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Removed the first of these claims. —Kusma (talk) 14:49, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title: At what position does the sequence of 9 digits 9 appear?

message: In MathWorld as of 1999; perhaps the first use of the name online? Someone might ask Weisstein where he got his initial list of terms. The later citation in MathWorld (to the Penguin Dictionary) notes the sequence but doesn't name it. – SJ + 15:09, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name and earlier reference