e, also called Euler’s Number after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is a very important constant that comes up in many different places in mathematics. It has an infinite number of digits, which can be calculated by summing:
Below we have the first 60.000 digits of e.
Your name is also somewhere in the infinite digits of e...
If we assign a number to each letter in the alphabet we can find your name within the digits of e, along with the complete works of William Shakespeare, the ending of Game of Thrones (spoiler alert), the full text of the Wikipedia from the year 2030 or what you’ll have tomorrow for breakfast.
At least that’s what mathematicians suspect. They think e is what is called a normal number. In normal numbers every possible sequence of digits of a certain length appears with the same frequency. There are approximately as many 1s as 9s, as many 23s as 42s, as many 0000s as 1111s, etc. So within the infinite digits of a normal number we are able to find any possible sequence of finite length.
DISCLAMER: We’d need to calculate a huge (beyond-astronomical) amount of digits… and also we’d find your name misspelled in every possible way, infinite copies of Hamlet that become just random noise at some point, false claims that you had tacos for breakfast (unless you did, no judgement) and most of all a seemingly unending whole lot of random gibberish.
The square root of 2 and pi are also believed to be normal, but just like with e it hasn’t yet been possible to prove that they are.
This site was created by IMAGINARY, a travelling exhibition that shows mathematics can be beautiful, interactive, something you can touch, or an ocean to dive into looking for hidden treasure. It has visited 55 countries since 2007 and is now celebrating its 10th birthday.
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