The story is on page 124 of Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Sent from my iPad On May 11, 2012, at 11:56 AM, Roger Hui <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
