section_path: Fundamentals/Irrationality and normality
section_name: Irrationality and normality
paragraph_text: Irrationality and normality
  
  π is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be written as the ratio of two integers. Fractions such as 22 / 7 and 355 / 113 are commonly used to approximate π, but no common fraction (ratio of whole numbers) can be its exact value. Because π is irrational, it has an infinite number of digits in its decimal representation, and does not settle into an infinitely repeating pattern of digits. There are several proofs that π is irrational; they generally require calculus and rely on the reductio ad absurdum technique. The degree to which π can be approximated by rational numbers (called the irrationality measure) is not precisely known; estimates have established that the irrationality measure is larger than the measure of e or ln 2 but smaller than the measure of Liouville numbers.
  
  The digits of π have no apparent pattern and have passed tests for statistical randomness, including tests for normality; a number of infinite length is called normal when all possible sequences of digits (of any given length) appear equally often. The conjecture that π is normal has not been proven or disproven.
  
  Since the advent of computers, a large number of digits of π have been available on which to perform statistical analysis. Yasumasa Kanada has performed detailed statistical analyses on the decimal digits of π, and found them consistent with normality; for example, the frequencies of the ten digits 0 to 9 were subjected to statistical significance tests, and no evidence of a pattern was found. Any random sequence of digits contains arbitrarily long subsequences that appear non-random, by the infinite monkey theorem. Thus, because the sequence of π 's digits passes statistical tests for randomness, it contains some sequences of digits that may appear non-random, such as a sequence of six consecutive 9s that begins at the 762nd decimal place of the decimal representation of π. This is also called the "Feynman point" in mathematical folklore, after Richard Feynman, although no connection to Feynman is known.