Form Champernowne constant by using concatenation to join the decimal representations of the positive integers after the decimal point. Champernowne proved in 1933 that this particular real number is a normal number in base ten. The construction is striking because its rule is completely explicit, while all finite words have the prescribed limiting digit block frequencies. [ref] Copeland and Erdős explicitly recall this result at the start of their own paper. [ref]
The first digits of Champernowne constant have the following exact counts, in digit order :
For the adjacent pairs fully inside that prefix, the words occur times respectively. Thus, for example, , which is about , rather than . The prefix ends partway through the decimal representation of ; the many leading ones in earlier positive integers help explain the visible imbalance.
Figure 1.
Exact digit and adjacent-pair frequencies in two prefixes of 100000 decimal digits
. The upper panels compare single-digit frequencies and list exact counts. The lower panels show all hundred overlapping pair frequencies, each with denominator , on the same vertical scale. The dashed line is the limiting reference for a normal number in base ten. In the periodic prefix, pairs through occur times each and occurs times; all other pairs are absent. Details.
These are finite counts, not a proof of the normal number theorem: a finite prefix can be followed by an all-zero tail. The theorem for Champernowne constant concerns the infinite limit, and establishes base-ten normality, rather than absolute normality. Nor do computations prove normality for familiar constants: the normality of Pi and Euler's number remains unproved, as discussed by Bailey and Borwein. [ref]

Articles by others on the same topic (NaN)

The Champernowne constant is a decimal number that is constructed by concatenating the positive integers in sequence. It is defined as follows: \[ C_{10} = 0.123456789101112131415161718192021...