a circle's circumference is than its diameter? It's a little more than three - we could call

it 3.14 or three and a seventh and be accurate enough for most applications. You could use

thirty nine decimal places and be accurate enough for all applications. But pi's digits

keep on going. Forever. And they're random. So this means you can find your birthday in

pi - mine occurs at the 33,870th decimal place. But what about something longer, like

your phone number? My 7-digit phone number doesn't occur within the first million decimal

digits, but because the digits are random and unending, I'm certain to find it if I

look far enough. In fact, for this reason, you can find any number you look for somewhere in pi.

Let's switch to binary for a bit - pi looks

like this now. The digits are just zeros and ones, but they're still random and unending,

and this means that any given sequence of digits will turn up if you look far enough

down the line. Computer files are just binary strings, so we could find your favorite mp3

somewhere in pi. We could find a picture of you in there, or a picture of what you'll

look like in 10 years. It's not likely that we'll find a particular sequence of digits

quickly, but we can rest assured that it's in there somewhere. There's the sound of your

first words in there, and a video of your 10th birthday party. Your DNA is in pi, along

with the DNA of every other creature. Every YouTube video, every Wikipedia article, every

piece of information that will ever exist is sitting there, already, somewhere in those

digits. So think about that the next time you see a circle.