Remember the old Graphing Calculator from Mac OS 9? I’ve been known to spend hours and hours playing with it, just typing in random equations in its 2D and 3D views to see what kind of pretty pictures I’d get. It’s still there in Classic, but what about a native OS X version?

I was playing with parabolas today and ran into this problem, so I hit the web and found Graph-O-Matic! for OS X. Spiffy! It seems to have many of the capabilities of Graphing Calculator, and like Graphing Calculator the really good stuff is disabled until you register with your $20US shareware fee.

Of course, if you really want to play with math, there’s always Mathematica.

In my recent article, Starting Over, I mentioned that I would try some educational software aimed at high school students, using the program to rebuild some mental muscles I haven’t flexed in a while. Some of my fears about educational software for kids became full-blown nightmares.

Title: Math Advantage 2004
Publisher: Encore Software
Rating: Poor

Cons: Says it runs in OS X, but really only runs in Classic. Low quality 8-bit graphics last seen in the early 90s. Mostly boring content.
Pros: Great if you have insomnia.

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But my name does. And the names of the rest of my immediate family, too. But not the string ‘scispot’. Bummer.

What the heck am I talking about? Well, in 1996 mathematicians discovered a formula (PDF) for calculating an arbitrary digit of π (and some other transcendental numbers) without calculating any of the preceding digits, but only in binary or hexadecimal number systems. Taking it a bit further, since characters on your computer screen are represented in hexadecimal, you could use a binary or hexadecimal representation of π and search for a binary representation of a string somewhere within.

You can try it yourself at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s π search website. Using a pre-computed list of the first four billion binary digits of π, a string search algorithm attempts to locate almost character string you type in the web form. The search finds my name at index 1629088764.

Finding strings in π is a little weird, but that the formula can produce the n^th binary digit without calculating prior digits is just strange. Which raises a bigger question: are the digits of π random?