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Mathematics Throughout History

The Creation of Zero and Pi

What is the Feynman Point?

The Feynman Point was named after Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988), who once joked he wanted to memorize pi up to “999999 … and so on and so on,” as if to say pi continues from the Feynman Point with nines forever. This is not true, of course, and the sequence of nines is a mere coincidence—thus, the joke of the Feynman Point. If pi were that predictable, then it would be a rational number, which it is not.



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