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When I applied to YC a few years ago, I believe I put down that the quadrillionth bit of Pi is zero.


Another interesting fact is that the last bit of Pi is 1. It's not difficult to see why when you stop and think about it, but if you tell that fact without the usual mathematical disclaimers (e.g. - Pi doesn't have a last digit in any base), it tends to put people into a funny "how the hell did you figure that out" state.


I don't get it. What does it mean that the last bit of Pi is 1 when there is no last digit?


The clincher is that rightmost 0's after a decimal point are insignificant and can be discarded similarly to leftmost 0's before a decimal point. 00045.26030 = 45.2603 - the extra 0's are simply noise. In binary, the only non-0 digit is 1. This means that, if Pi does in fact terminate, its binary representation must terminate in a 1 - any 0's to the right of the last 1 carry no value.

Now, that's a pretty big "if", but this isn't meant to be serious mathematics. It's just an interesting consequence of binary representation and the assumption that Pi might terminate, and is enough to make people do a bit of a double take when you phrase it along the lines of "the last bit of Pi [if it has one] is a 1".


rightmost 0's

... which Pi doesn't have, since it has no rightmost bits at all...

the last bit of Pi [if it has one] is a 1

This is true; it's also true that the last bit of Pi [if it has one] is a forty-two. A falsehood implies everything.


You clearly don't think in Unicode.


Did you get in? If not, were you invited for an interview?


PG wrote to tell me that they couldn't accept me due to my inability to move to the bay area. (Which is exactly the result I expected.)




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