By the way, did you know that your social security number, you phone number, and even the digital representation of your favorite hymn can be found within the endless digits of pi? You can find search for specific strings in the first 2 million digits of pi here. Longer strings may require much longer searches.

Here's a confession: when I was a teenager, about 14, a friend and I memorized the first couple hundred or so digits of pi. One day in science class my friend and I did a memory trick where he pretended to rattle off random digits, around 75 of them, as someone recorded the numbers, and then I rattled them back perfectly. Just digits from pi, starting a few after the famous 3.14159 opening. Was quite fun, actually. A mental magic trick, sort of, from a geeky amateur magician goofing around in a class that didn't have much of an adult presence at times. This little achievement naturally leads to a reasonable question you may have: why am I not still single??

Fortunately, I grew past that stage and moved on to more important things in life. You know, things like the number e: 2.718281828459045.... already a cool pattern in the random digits of another transcendental number