Delta Pi

By Andrew Burt

Whoever says Pi is a constant simply hasn't checked it precisely enough — which may be a good thing!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Burt
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458101785

Andrew Burt

Dr. Andrew Burt (www.aburt.com) has lots of published science fiction and is a former Vice President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. He's been a computer science professor (specializing in AI, networking, security, privacy, and social issues); founder of Nyx.net, the world's first free internet service provider; CEO of custom software developer TechSoft, and a technology consultant/author/speaker. For a hobby, he constructs solutions to the world's problems. Fortunately, nobody listens.

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Delta Pi

Δ π

by

Andrew Burt

Published by Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 Andrew Burt

www.aburt.com

Discover other titles by Andrew Burt at Smashwords.com

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Delta Pi

Δ π

Monday, 06/08/2037

(being the date,

and the first occurrence

of the digits 06082037 in Pi,

starting at the 38,117,837th decimal.)

Kinsey Stafford noticed it—or, rather, the effect of it—in his office at the Center for Mathematical Studies, Cambridge, England. His chest tightened and he hung his head in grief: His program to calculate the deep digits of pi had suddenly crashed. In a race against time to save his career, he'd just lost precious months' work.

Monica Ozawa, at the other end of the video link in Kuala Lumpur, noticed it too. What in hell was that? Her program crashed likewise.

The staff at the Rio superconducting supercollider noticed it, thousands of miles away from either.

Two small children playing in Mexico City really noticed it as their cinderblock walls crashed down on them from the resulting earthquake, an intensity XII on the twelve degree Mercalli damage index. The media, still in love with the useless