The San Francisco Exploratorium - possibly the coolest kids museum on the planet - has a large poker-chip-tossing machine on display for kids to calculate Pi. On my last visit there a crowd of children - not even nerd children (sorry Eve, I'm stereotyping here...) - were all standing around watching it.
-- (September 4, 2005) on Calculation of Pi Using the Monte Carlo Method
Anyone who's got this far is obviously irrational (sic) enough to appreciate http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_dig.html. (All you US taxpayers, this is what NASA is spending its time and money on... While I can see good cases for accurate calculations of pi, e etcetera, I challenge anyone to think of a use for root-6 to a million SFs.) Oddly the site _doesn't_ include any calculation of the one irrational number one would think would be of most use to an organisation whose primary purpose involves calculating curves...
-- (April 17, 2005) on Pi
If you really want to take this to it's logical extreme, work out the frequencies of 1 and 0 in the binary expression of pi. Intuition tells me that 1 would be way ahead, but I can't explain why I think this.
-- (April 16, 2005) on Frequency of Each Digit of Pi
Surely Chris's comment above that "zero is more likely to occur" is just an example of the innate problem with probability people seem to have. If I flip a coin ten times and it lands tails-up seven times, that does not mean that my next coin flip is more likely to be heads to "even the score". If you bet on a horse ten times and it lost every time, you wouldn't bet on it again as it was now due a win...Were pi to be calculated to infinity, then - assuming it's a normal number - then working from the fists 10,000,000 digits we would expect an infinite number of fours and infinity-minus-1653 zeroes.
BTW Eve I think you need to bring back the green antenna photos. I was just leafing through a 1995 copy of Mac Format magazine and saw you beaming out at me as 'one of the coolest sites on the web'.
-- (April 16, 2005) on Frequency of Each Digit of Pi
Just to say it's wonderful to find the Pi Page still going - as a young(ish) graduate in the early 1990s, the site probably did more than anything else to convince me that Mosaic (ask your grandparents) was useful for something other than downloading porn and spreading maliciously doctored photos worldwide. If there's ever an Internet Lifetime Achievement Award, I'll happily nominate Eve...And another thing - how come nowhere on this page can I find my favourite property of pi, our old friend e^(i*pi)-1?
And another thing (part 2) - I just want to point out that I got 13/25 on the Pi Test - and am a qualified mathematician (who admittedly graduated 13 years ago but even so!)
And (one last) thing - if the page needs a pompous slogan it should really be "One measures a circle beginning anywhere" (motto of the Fortean Society and all its spin-offs) - it may be meaningless but it sounds very impressive. Which in itself kinda sums up most mathematics.
-- (December 29, 2002) on Pi