FIND YOUR BIRTHDAY IN PI, IN THREE DIFFERENT FORMATS

It was Pi Day (March 14, like 3/14, like 3.14, get it?) recently and Time Magazine did a fun interactive app in which you can find your birthday inside the digits of pi.

However:
1) They only used one format of birthday, in which July 4th would be 704. But there are other ways to write July 4. Like 0704 or 74. And those must be investigated, right?
2) Our friend Dave Pennock said he wanted to see the locations of every possible birthday inside pi.

So here they are. Enjoy! And R code below if you are interested. Plot and other stuff use Hadley Wickham’s Tidyverse tools.

And what the heck, have a spreadsheet of fun (i.e., spreadsheet with all the birthdays and locations in it).

R CODE
library(ggplot2) library(readr) library(stringr) library(tidyr) pistring = read_file("pi.txt") #choose 2016 b/c it's a leap year dayvec = seq(as.Date('2016-01-01'), as.Date('2016-12-31'), by = 1) dayvec = str_sub(dayvec, start = 6, end = 10) shorterdayvec = sub("0(.-.)", "\\1", dayvec) shortestdayvec = sub("(.-)0(.)$", "\\1\\2", shorterdayvec) df = data.frame( birthday = dayvec, loc = str_locate(pistring, gsub("-", "", dayvec))[, 1], shorter_bday = shorterdayvec, shorter_loc = str_locate(pistring, gsub("-", "", shorterdayvec))[, 1], shortest_bday = shortestdayvec, shortest_loc = str_locate(pistring, gsub("-", "", shortestdayvec))[, 1] ) write.csv(df, file = "birthdays_in_pi.csv", row.names = FALSE) long_df = df %>% gather(key, location, loc, shorter_loc, shortest_loc) p = ggplot(long_df, aes(x = location, fill = key)) p = p + geom_density(alpha = .3) p = p + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(0, 40000)) p = p + theme(legend.position = "bottom") p ggsave( plot = p, file = "birthdays_in_pi.pdf", height = 4, width = 4 )

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