Citations:piphilologist

English citations of piphilologists and piphilologist

• 2006, Stephen Brown, The Marketing Code, Cyan Communications, →ISBN (10), →ISBN (13), 30:

  “Piphilology?” // “Memorising the span of digits of pi. You know, the mathematical constant that measures the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. There’s no pattern to the digits. More than a trillion decimal places have been calculated. Even the biggest supercomputers can’t find a pattern.” // “So?” // “So . . . piphilologists memorise the places. They run competitions and stuff. My mother used to enter me for them when I was a kid. She liked that kind of thing: spelling bees, Trivial Pursuit, backgammon, piphilology. I used to be able to ‘do the digits’ for hours. I’ve forgotten most of it now, but I remembered enough to give the Hustler interview panel a taste of the old 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510. They said they were very impressed. Very impressed.”

• 2015, Peter Olofsson, Probabilities: The Little Numbers That Rule Our Lives, John Wiley & Sons (second edition), →ISBN, chapter ix: “Faking Probabilities: Computer Simulation”, §: ‘Is Random Really Random?’, 300:

  Are there deviations from the correct proportions of the digits 0–9 or any discernible patterns? The answer seems to be “no,” and when the digits of π are tested against digits produced by commercial random number generators, the ancient number does pretty well. So if you happen to be a piphilologist and are asked to produce a sequence of random digits, just start with 3, 1, 4, and keep going. If you are afraid that your bluff will be caught, you can also memorize the square root of 2 or the logarithm of 2 and perhaps mix the digits from all three. It’s up to you.