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.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
Never Tell People What They Can't Do
From a press release by the American Mathematical Society:
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