Post

On this Pi Day, I want everyone to remember that the stupidest thing Carl Sagan ever wrote was at the very end of the novel Contact, where Ellie found a pattern in the base-11 representation of pi. 🧵

⌨

@plutor.org

"The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle--another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point."

14/3/25, 5:31 pm0 reposts0 likes

⌨

@plutor.org

14 Mar 2025

Even Carl must have known that pi is almost certainly "normal" -- i.e. that all sequences of digits are equally likely to appear. On the other hand, the creators of the universe chose to put a really crazy number of 69s in pi. In this essay, I will