Have you ever thought to yourself “self, why don’t you have a book filled with a million digits of pi?” Well wonder no more, I’ve got you covered!
I’ve made a series of digit books for anyone to print out. This idea all started when I discovered I had over a thousand pages on my print queue in the library. “Why don’t you just print out a million digits of pi?” my sister said. So I did.
But it couldn’t be just digits, it had to be formatted so to be easily searchable. And it couldn’t be just the formatted digits; it had to have a cover.
So I broke the digits up into groups of ten, and have five groups on a line, with the corresponding position of digits. So the lines look like this:
2.
7182818284 5904523536 0287471352 6624977572 4709369995 : 50
9574966967 6277240766 3035354759 4571382178 5251664274 : 100
2746639193 2003059921 8174135966 2904357290 0334295260 : 150
5956307381 3232862794 3490763233 8298807531 9525101901 : 200
1573834187 9307021540 8914993488 4167509244 7614606680 : 250
8226480016 8477411853 7423454424 3710753907 7744992069 : 300
5517027618 3860626133 1384583000 7520449338 2656029760 : 350
6737113200 7093287091 2744374704 7230696977 2093101416 : 400
Where the digit just left of the colon is the position given on the right.
As for the cover, I’d use the symbol, but not quite. The covers are actually the numbers themselves, shaped to look like their symbol. It took quite a bit of finagling and arguing with LaTeX to figure it out (one of the many problems I have with LaTeX is that examples will not work even if I copy and paste them exactly), but I managed to make some decent covers.
Best of all, no words whatsoever! Alright, not quite true, there’s a single word in it, but that’s so you can find your way back here where you got it from. These I’m gonna say are the first edition. I decided each book needs a one page summary of what the heck it is, but I haven’t written them all yet. So the second edition will have them.
(click on the one you want for the pdf to print out)
These PDF’s are to be printed on both sides (duplex print). Doing so will take a hundred and fifty-six pages. After it’s printed you can get it bound at any local print shop (you can get it printed there as well!). I went with a clear plastic front to see the cover and a cardboard back.
The binding cost me roughly two and a half dollars for a book. I got a quote from the print shop saying it would cost around fifteen dollars to print out a single copy of a digit book. So all in all, it would run you less than twenty dollars to print and bind one of these. Not too bad.
I’ve only done these few constants but I can easily do more (and plan to!). Some constants however I’ll pass on as they’re either not interesting with their digits, like Liouville’s constant which is mostly zeros, or Champernowne’s constant which is just the integers concatenated; or no one has calculated a million digits of them yet, like Feigenbaum’s constant.
Yes this is a silly project. But sometimes you need to do something silly.
Orthallelous 
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