Pi is an interesting number. It goes on forever, doesn’t repeat itself, and appears to be entirely random. And in an infinite, random sequence, you get every possible combination of numbers eventually. Your phone number is in there somewhere. And every book written, if you convert the numbers into ASCII.
Searching Pi for books like that would be stupid though, you’ll burn up the best computers on the planet before you get anything worthwhile. There is, however, a quicker alternative.
Almost every single book published since 1966 has an ISBN number. These days they all start 978, then there’s another ten digits. The last one’s a check digit made by multiplying the others up in a certain way.
So I wrote a program that searches Pi for ISBN numbers. Then it checks them to see if the check digit is a valid one. Then it looks the ISBN up on Google Books.
Something about this project just tweaks the book nerd in me. My only complaint is that it’s not “ISBN number” it’s “ISBN.” Saying “ISBN number” is like saying “PIN number.”
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
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One Reply to “The PiSBN Project”
Yup, fair call! It’s RAS* syndrome, nearly as annoying as PIN numbers. Mea culpa 😉
Pi is an interesting number. It goes on forever, doesn’t repeat itself, and appears to be entirely random. And in an infinite, random sequence, you get every possible combination of numbers eventually. Your phone number is in there somewhere. And every book written, if you convert the numbers into ASCII.
Yup, fair call! It’s RAS* syndrome, nearly as annoying as PIN numbers. Mea culpa 😉
Best,
Geoff
*Redundant Acronym Syndrome