Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Never Tell People What They Can't Do

From a press release by the American Mathematical Society:
In his 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose commented on the limitations on human knowledge with a striking example: He conjectured that we would most likely never know whether a string of 10 consecutive 7s appears in the digital expansion of the number pi. Just 8 years later, Yasumasa Kanada used a computer to find exactly that string, starting at the 17387594880th digit of pi....
Here's more about Kanada, and here's his Web page.

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