From Newsgroup: sci.lang

Yes, Richard Feynman and Raymond Smullyan were childhood
friends. Both were born and raised in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York,
and attended grade school together in the same neighborhood.
Smullyan specifically mentions that he was a grade school
classmate of Feynman. Their shared early environment in Far Rockaway is frequently noted in biographical accounts of both figures.


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The Feynman point refers to the sequence of six consecutive
nines (999999) that appears in the decimal expansion of pi (-C), starting
at the 762nd digit after the decimal point. This point is notable
because such a long run of identical digits is statistically rare so
early in the sequence, leading to its fame as a mathematical curiosity.

The name honors physicist Richard Feynman, who is said to have
joked about memorizing pi up to that point and then mischievously
claiming pi is rational by reciting the six nines and saying "and so
on". However, there is no clear record of Feynman actually making this
remark in a lecture, and the story has become part of mathematical
folklore.

___________________________________________

The remarkable repetition at digit #763 is called the Feynman

point.


Skipping 2 times...
(skipping 4 repeats, and 5 repeats)
doesn't seem all that remarkable.


_______________________________________________
Repeated digits in pi
Walter Nissen
Dec 5, 1995


Since my last post, I have learned a bit about this problem, but very
little. I thank each of the respondents for their help. This is what I
know. 3 is the first single digit in pi. 33 is the first doubled digit.
111 is the first tripled digit. From searches at Jeremy Gilbert's Web
page, http://gryphon.ccs.brandeis.edu/~grath/attractions/gpi/index.html,
I
derive this table:

digits digit #
3 1
33 25
111 154
999999 763
3333333 710101

http://cad.ucla.edu:8001/amiinpi confirms the first part of this.

The remarkable repetition at digit #763 is called the Feynman point.

Perhaps because the late, great Richard P. Feynman called attention to
it??

I would welcome any information about extension of this table,
especially
resources on the Net. What I have so far seems pitiful compared to the
4G
computed digits.

Thanks.

Cheers.

Walter Nissen dk...@cleveland.freenet.edu
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