I'd Rather Be Frying Bacon

The subject line is the first twenty or so digits of pi, typed from memory. If you want more, here are the first 100,000 digits. Do a web search for "digits of pi" and you'll find many other pages with ridiculous numbers of places listed out (one goes out to 50 million -- it's a zip file of course!). Someone even put together a search page which will scan the first 100 million digits of pi for any string of digits you desire. I found my birthday, old and new phone numbers I have had (without area codes), and all the zip codes I have lived in, but not my social security number. And you thought math was no fun.

I use examples from these pages in my math classes to impress upon the students what the difference between rational (any number that can be written as a fraction -- essentially integers and any terminating or repeating decimals) and irrational (non-terminating, non-repeating decimals, like the square root of 2, pi, and e, the base of the natural logarithm) numbers is, and to discuss the difference between approximate and exact values of irrational numbers.

While preparing for the first day of the new school year (this Friday), I came across the following page, RJN's More Digits of Irrational Numbers Page. Here you will find more digits than you ever wanted to see for any number. Note the web address includes nasa.org -- if you go to the main site, you'll find neat little movies and other bits having to do with astronomy and astrophysics.

Personally, my favorite part of the page is this sentence:
"They [the numbers] are not copyrighted and we do not think it is legally justifiable to copyright such a basic thing as the digits of a commonly used irrational number."

I'm just amused they took the time to point that out.