Well, clearly Ron's idea for the humorous notation didn't come from the Feynman book as it wasn't published until 18 years later...
By the way, I just dropped a PDF of Surely You're Joking into iBook on my iPad. It is a fun book that I will enjoy reading again. But searches for phrases and digit didn't turn up a similar story... - joey iPa... On May 10, 2012, at 14:23, Roger Hui <[email protected]> wrote: >> Ron Frank came in, looked at the copy on his desk, circled a >> digit towards the end of the long number and wrote, "Are you sure about >> this digit?" and put it back on the Desk Jeff was using. > > This sounds very much like an anecdote in Richard Feynman's *Surely You're > Joking, Mr. Feynman?* But then my memory is going too. > > > > On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:52 PM, Joey K Tuttle <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Upon looking a little more at the page - >> >> http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/ >> >> mentioned in the post below, I was amused to note that the last 138 of >> the 4,194,304 places of pi displayed on that page are random and/or >> wrong. Problems begin about decimal place 4194166 which is shown as 9 >> but should be 7. I suppose such errors are not very high up on the list >> of misrepresentations on web pages, but in my case it caused a smile and >> memory of an event that took place some 40 years ago. >> >> Jeffery Shallit ( http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/ ) was a summer >> intern at the IBM Philadelphia Scientific Center in 1972 (I think). He >> was working on some high precision computations using APL. I can't >> remember whether it was a precise evaluation of pi to several thousand >> places, or perhaps Mersenne prime #24 ( _1 + 2^19937x ) - but in any >> case, Jeffery had succeeded in printing out this lengthy number, and >> left a copy of the pages of digits on several people's desks. The next >> morning, Ron Frank came in, looked at the copy on his desk, circled a >> digit towards the end of the long number and wrote, "Are you sure about >> this digit?" and put it back on the Desk Jeff was using. >> >> That afternoon, Jeff came in and discovered the note and raced into >> Ron's office saying, "How do you know that digit is wrong??" To which >> Ron calmly replied, "I have no idea if it is correct or not - I was just >> asking if you were sure...." >> >> I was (am still) impressed with Jeffery's work because he did it in an >> 80Kbyte APL workspace. Hard to imagine these days when it is routine to >> work with a hundred thousand times that much memory.... Although I note >> that J only consumes 80704 bytes to calculate _1 + 2^19937x that's >> impressive too. >> >> I've copied Jeffery on this note, and wish I had an address to pass my >> memory past Ron. In my experience, it seems likely to me that either >> they wouldn't have any memory of such an event, or might have versions >> quite different from my memory. It is strange/interesting how our >> memories work. >> >> On 2012/05/08 09:44 , Joey K Tuttle wrote: >>> Being a fan of things pi, I'm wondering about several things in your >> post. >>> >>> The URL you give points to a site purporting to have 4 (not 50) million >>> digits of pi. Maybe I missed a pointer to a larger dataset. >>> >>> >>> >>> On 2012/05/08 03:56 , Joe Bohart wrote: >>> >>> I've load 50 million integer digits of pi and trying to do a moving >> average >>> on them. >>> >>> NB. data from http://zenwerx.com/projects/pi-digits/pi/ >>> NB. used perl to write each digits on 1 line of file data >>> >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
