Today, March 14th is Pi Day. Aka 3.14. Today I’m having some fun with this obscenely long number and how it fits into today’s media.
Running a test to see what the first 280 characters of pi look like in a tweet:
I’m not the only one tweeting the first 280 characters of pi. Lots of people are doing it:
Another fun way of looking at all the people who tweeted the first 280 characters in 3.14: A scrolling video in Tweetdeck. LOTS of people!
Imagine if all these people actually knew the first 280 digits in pi, and typed them in manually.
Pasting in a long pi number into a field is a good way of testing how many characters the field can hold. e.g. The user status in Google Chat can hold 64 characters. I paste in a long pi number into my status, and it gets cropped down to 64 chars.
What if Twitter changed the how long a tweet could be based on the number of digits of pi known? Let’s say we we know only the first 100 digits of pi, then a tweet can be 100 characters long.
This example might have worked back in 1706 when John Machin upped the pi digit count from 71 to 100. But the current digits of pi is out of this world. Last year researchers set a new record for calculating digits of pi: 62.8 trillion decimals. Um. That’s a long tweet.
If we go with this game of tweet length matching pi digits known, our current 280 tweet limit would roughly match up with 1853 when 248 pi digits were calculated.
| Year | Who | Decimal places |
|---|---|---|
| 1400 | Madhava of Sangamagrama | 10 |
| 1424 | Jamshīd al-Kāshī | 16 |
| 1596 | Ludolph van Ceulen | 20 |
| 1615 | Ludolph van Ceulen | 32 |
| 1621 | Willebrord Snell (Snellius) | 35 |
| 1630 | Christoph Grienberger | 38 |
| 1699 | Abraham Sharp | 71 |
| 1706 | John Machin | 100 |
| 1719 | Thomas Fantet de Lagny | 112 |
| 1789 | Jurij Vega | 126 |
| 1794 | Jurij Vega | 136 |
| Late 18th century | Anonymous manuscript | 152 |
| 1844 | Zacharias Dase and Strassnitzky | 200 |
| 1847 | Thomas Clausen | 248 |
| 1853 | Lehmann | 261 |
| 1853 | Rutherford | 440 |
| 1853 | William Shanks | 527 |
| 1946 | D. F. Ferguson | 620 |
| January 1947 | D. F. Ferguson | 710 |
| September 1947 | D. F. Ferguson | 808 |
| 1949 | Levi B. Smith and John Wrench | 1,120 |
Known digits of pi equals the number of characters in 20 million Bibles
Just how long is 62.8 trillion decimals? The average English word is 4.7 characters. That would be 15.7 trillion words. The King James Authorized Bible has 783,137 words. That would be 20 million Bibles.
Google Books’ scanned library has 25 million books. Wow. All the books that Google has scanned are roughly the equivalent of how many digits in pi we know. (Of course, all the books that Google has scanned are not as long as the King James Bible.)
Known digits of pi is the equivalent of 148 million novels
The average word count for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. For children’s fiction, the general rule is The average word count for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. For children’s fiction, the general rule is the younger the audience the shorter the book, and for YA novels the average is 50,000-70,000 words. Non-fiction word counts sit between 70,000-120,000 words.
Average Novel Word Count
If we take the average o 70,000-120,000 we have 95,000 words for each novel. Let’s knock that down to 90,000 words to account for children’s fiction. At 4.7 characters per word, that’s 423,000 characters per book.
62.8 trillion digits in pi divided by 423,000 characters in a novel= 148,463,356.974 novels.
That’s 148 million novels.
I’d like to figure out how they store all the 62.8 trillion digits of pi. Really, that has gotta take up a ton of hard drive space.