![\"pi-portland-max.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/docbug.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/legacy\/pi-portland-max.jpg\")
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I was in the Washington Park MAX Station in Portland yesterday, which includes a core sample taken during the tunnel’s construction along with a 16-million-year timeline showing when each sample had been at the Earth’s surface. Etched into the wall along the timeline include technical and mathematical discoveries, including 107 digits of pi. Only, I noticed as I read through the digits, it’s wrong. The first row is correct, but the rest looks random. My friend and I speculated on our ride back why that might be. Was it an estimate, the result of calculating only the first several terms of an infinite series? A deliberate retelling of an historically significant blunder? A secret code left by the artist that translates to “help, I’m being held captive in a Portland artist colony!”<\/i>?<\/p>\n
Google to the rescue, it turns out this was either a clever way of representing the first 1000 digits of pi, or more likely was a simple misreading of the reference book from which the number came. As Mark Cowan points out in Underground Pi<\/a>, the numbers etched in stone in the subway were taken from A History of Pi<\/i><\/a>, which prints the digits in rows of 10 groups of 10 digits. The artist clearly took his numbers from the first column<\/i> in that reference, thus printing the first thru tenth fractional digits, the 101th-110th, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was in the Washington Park MAX Station in Portland yesterday, which includes a core sample taken during the tunnel’s construction along with a 16-million-year timeline showing when each sample had been at the Earth’s surface. Etched into the wall along the timeline include technical and mathematical discoveries, including 107 digits of pi. Only, I noticed as I read through the digits, it’s wrong. The first row is correct, but the rest looks random. My friend and I speculated on our ride back why that might be. Was it an estimate, the result of calculating only the first several terms of an infinite series? A deliberate retelling of an historically significant blunder? A secret code left by the artist that translates to “help, I’m being held captive in a Portland artist colony!”<\/i>?<\/p>\n Google to the rescue, it turns out this was either a clever way of representing the first 1000 digits of pi, or more likely was a simple misreading of the reference book from which the number came. As Mark Cowan points out in Underground Pi<\/a>, the numbers etched in stone in the subway were taken from A History of Pi<\/i><\/a>, which prints the digits in rows of 10 groups of 10 digits. The artist clearly took his numbers from the first column<\/i> in that reference, thus printing the first thru tenth fractional digits, the 101th-110th, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.docbug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n