Wolfram Demonstrations Project

12,000+ Open Interactive Demonstrations
Powered by Notebook Technology »

Randomness in the Digits of Square Roots

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

Each of these "walks" is a plot of the accumulated total of the digits of the square root of a number. The digits are normalized so that the midpoint of their range is always zero. Despite this simple definition, these sequences seem for practical purposes random.

Contributed by: Stephen Wolfram (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Snapshots

Details

Each successive step goes up or down by an amount determined by the successive digits in the square root, normalized so that the middle of the possible digits corresponds to 0.

Can you find a case where the curve is not trivial, but still has some form of recognizable regularity? No such example is currently known.

Embed Code

Take advantage of the Wolfram Notebook Emebedder for the recommended user experience.

Related Demonstrations More by Author
Browse all topics
Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send