The Feynman story I remember was that he was shown a complicated engineering diagram. He pointed to a place at random and asked, "are you sure this works?"
On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 11:48 PM, Joey K Tuttle <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
