Enter your name here:Your chances: 3 or fewer letters: about 100% 7 or more letters: about 0%.
How can my name be in e?
I converted e to base 27 (if you don't know what that means, read the section What does base 27 mean below). I took the digits to represent letters, according to 1=A, 2=B, and so on. The digit 0 is punctuation.
In this way, the expansion of e looks like a long string of letters (with occasional punctuation), namely
e = B.SJPY... = B +
S
27
+
J
272
+
P
273
+
Y
274
+ ...
where A=1, B=2, C=3,..., Z=26.
How many digits of e do you have?
I have over 1,000,000 digits in base 27. This represents the same
accuracy as 1,500,000 decimal digits. If that sounds like a lot,
it still only gives a 82% chance of finding a given 4 letter name!
If your name has 5 letters, I'm sorry but the chance is only about
7.2%! And 6 letters? Less than 0.5%. Three letter names have a much
better chance. I would be very surprised if someone typed in a 3
letter name and didn't find it! Please let me know if this happens!
Most occur over a dozen times, in fact.
To get a reasonable chance of finding 5 letter names, I would need
over 16,000,000 digits in base 27. This is my goal. I can't have
much more than that without running out of space on the server.
Why did you choose base 27 and not 26?
Base 27 is the neatest way which allows me to represent the digit 1 as A, 2 as B, ..., and 26 as Z. With Base 26, I would have to use A=0, B=1, etc... or A=1, B=2, ..., Y=25, Z=0. I think my system is the prettiest. If you don't like it, you can always set up your own search page... :-)
How did you get the digits?
I used a free program called pifast33 to get 1.5 million digits in base 10. This took about a minute. Then I used a program of my own to convert the digits to base 27. This took about a day. Ouch! I think I need to rewrite my program...
Why did you do it?
Do I need a reason?? :-)
Interesting e facts
Here are some interesting features of this way to represent e.
The first animal: The first animal is the OX, at the 859th place. But there is a CAAAAT at position 266, followed shortly by a latin mouse...
The first country: The Middle Eastern country IRAN, population about 70 million, is the first, coming in at position 107018. Abbreviations like UK don't count!
The first name: At the 244th place, the first name in e is MOE. Unless Dez, Jed or Tituz are names...
The first number: E appears in the seventh place after the decimal. If you insist on whole numbers, the first is ONE, at the 895th position. But then, you've always known that ONE was the first number, didn't you...
The first ordinal: The first - it had to be, really - is FIRST, appearing at the 687342nd place of e
The first book of the Bible: Coming in at the 5953rd position is JOB, the story of thesuffering of a righteous man.
The first planet: The first planet is the fourth - MARS appears at the 864650th place of e. Admittedly, the competition from the other planets is not strong.
The first chemical element: TIN is first (at the 15408th place), beating LEAD to the lead by 19476 places. Actually, I didn't check them all. If you find a closer one, let me know.
The first English word in e is AT, at ?
What does "base 27" mean?
Many people know that e, the base of the natural logarithm, 2.71828... This actually means that
e = 2 +
7
10
+
1
102
+
8
103
+
2
104
+
8
105
+ ...
Because the number "10" keeps appearing in the denominator, we say this is
e in "base 10". It is also why we have 10 different digits.
There is no reason why we have to use 10, however.
The ancient Babylonians used 60 different
digits! Even today, computer scientists sometimes use base 16 (with 16
digits 0 to 9 and A to F), base 8 (with digits 0 to 7) or even base 2
(with only two digits 0 and 1!).
If we were using base 16, we would say
e was 2.B7E15..., meaning
e = 2 +
B
16
+
7
162
+
E
163
+
1
164
+
5
165
+ ...
here, the "B" represents the "digit" 11, and the "E" represents 14. In base 16, there are 16 digits, usually represented as 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E and F.
I wanted people to be able to look for their name in e. The alphabet
has 26 letters, and it would be nice if A was 1, B was 2, C was 3
and so on. But there has to be a zero digit! So I decided to work out
e in "base 27", with the 27 digits 0,A,B,C,...,Y and Z.
