Everything is in pi, just everything

It seems likely that every single finite sequence of numbers that there is, or ever will be, appears within the never-ending digits of pi. Think about that. It’s just an amazing concept.

That doesn’t just mean that your date of birth is in there, although it is. It means that if you digitally encoded all of your DNA and so turned yourself into a number it would be in there. And if you digitally encoded the entirety of the Earth, well that’s in there too.

Now mathematicians are not absolutely certain that pi does not have an end or that it never repeats, but they are pretty sure that’s the case. And it follows that, if you have a non-repeating sequence of numbers that does not have an end, every single finite sequence of numbers has got to be in there somewhere.

There’s a cute little search engine which allows you to search the first 200 million digits of pi for any string of numbers. So, for example, my date of birth occurs at position 105,616,963 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.

If you take the word ‘Sydney’ and convert it to digits simply based on the letters’ position in the alphabet (which makes 1925414525), well, sadly for the purposes of this article  it’s not in the first 200 million digits of pi. But it’s in their somewhere… and so is everything else.

The Pi search page, along with a huge number of other fascinating pi facts can be found here.