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Experimental mathematics: Computing power leads to insights

cab1729:

In his 1989 book “The Emperor’s New Mind”, Roger Penrose commented on the limitations on human knowledge with a striking example: He conjectured that we would most likely never know whether a string of 10 consecutive 7s appears in the digital expansion of the number pi. Just 8 years later, Yasumasa Kanada used a computer to find exactly that string, starting at the 22869046249th digit of pi. Penrose was certainly not alone in his inability to foresee the tremendous power that computers would soon possess. Many mathematical phenomena that not so long ago seemed shrouded and unknowable, can now be brought into the light, with tremendous precision.

(via proofmathisbeautiful)

Source: cab1729