My buddy Dan likes to pride himself on his ability with numbers and Excel. Unfortunately both have let him down in a recent post [LINK] entitled "Eat Humble Pi".

Dan’s claim to fame is his ability to recite Pi to the 20th decimal, so imagine how quick he was to point out the error in a recent photo taken of a sculpture taken at the Oregon Zoo. Here’s the photo.

 

Poor Dan so quick to judge thought that the artist’s sole intention was to list Pi in a square format. He quickly noticed however that the numbers are not correct and assumed an error on the part of the un-educated artist.

 

I looked a little deeper and discovered that these are in fact portions of pi from the first 1000 digits. After 10 mins examining the numbers I came up with the following:

 

 

So clearly there is NO error on the artist’s part and in fact there is a pattern to the numbers. It would appear the square is divide diagonally. The first 10 digits of the 2nd line match Pi at position 102. Eight of the next row’s numbers match Pi at position 204 and this continues up until the 6th row. 62 actually matches in a few places but following the pattern is also matches at position 510.

 

Interestingly there are nine rows total. Rows 7, 8 and 9 also match but the pattern starts over. The first 10 digits of row 7 match at position 702, a break in the previous sequence of 102, 204, 306, 408 etc.

 

Again 10 digits from row 7, then 8 digits of row 8 and finally 6 digits of row 9.

 

Then taking the numbers that were left over from the rows, starting with row 2, 44 matches at position 202. 7245 matches at position 302. So another sequence is revealed there. There’s a break at position 702 though. Maybe that’s because position 702 was already matched at row 7?

 

I tried one other thing this morning which is to re-arrage ALL the numbers into rows of 10 instead of 12. This yields much better results.

Digits	Found At
8214808651	101
4428810975	201
7245870066	301
3305727036	401
9833673362	501
0005681271	601
4201995611	701
5024459455	801
5982534904	901

 

This still leaves some digits left-over, namely 897932.

At least this proves the artist was not foolish enough to carve random numbers into the rock hoping no one would question that they’re Pi. And more importantly it also gave me a rare chance to stick it to Dan How’s the pie Dan?