Pi hits six 9s in a row at digit 762 — then waits 1.72 million more digits before a seventh 9 ever joins the run.

Pi's first six-in-a-row 9s land at decimal place 762, but a seventh 9 doesn't extend that run until decimal place 1,722,776.

Start counting the digits after pi's decimal point and keep going. At the 762nd place you hit a 9, and then another, and another — six 9s in a row: 999999. It's a startling little cluster this early in a number famous for having no pattern at all. Mathematicians call it the Feynman point, and the surprise isn't just that it exists. It's how long pi makes you wait before it does it again with one more nine.

That next milestone — the first run of *seven* consecutive 9s — doesn't arrive until decimal place 1,722,776. Pi extends its own record by a single repeated digit only after churning through roughly 1.72 million more places. Six 9s show up at digit 762; seven 9s show up almost 2,264 times deeper into the expansion.

Why the Feynman point matters

The name honors the physicist Richard Feynman, who reportedly joked that he'd like to memorize pi out to that stretch of 9s so he could recite "…nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, and so on" — as if the digits went on repeating forever. They don't, of course, but the point where you *could* pull that stunt sits remarkably close to the start.

The full sequence of first appearances is documented in the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences as A048940, and reproduced by Eric Weisstein on Wolfram's MathWorld in his entries "Feynman Point" and "Pi Digits." The positions where a run of n identical 9s first shows up read: 5, 44, 762, 762, 762, 762, 1,722,776, 36,356,642, 564,665,206.

Look closely and something jumps out. A single 9 first appears at place 5, a pair at 44 — and then 762 shows up four times in a row. That means the runs of three, four, five, and six 9s all begin at the *same* spot. The Feynman point isn't four separate lucky streaks; it's one dense block of six 9s, and every shorter run inside it starts at the same digit. It's the same 999999 counted from its front edge.

How we know it's really the first

Claims about "the first occurrence" of anything in pi are only as good as the digit computation behind them. These positions come from exhaustively scanning verified expansions of pi, the same computed datasets that let Weisstein state a related fact on the Pi Digits page: the string 9999998 beginning at decimal 762 is the largest value any seven consecutive digits take in the entire first million decimals. If a run of seven 9s had appeared anywhere before the million mark, that claim would be false — so the two facts confirm each other. The seven-9 run at 1,722,776 lands well past that first-million window, exactly as the record demands. Weisstein cites David Wells's 1986 *Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers* (p. 51) alongside the OEIS entry, giving the finding both a print pedigree and an open, machine-checkable database.

Here's the vivid part. Six 9s at digit 762 sit inside a stretch a person could actually memorize. But to reach the seven-9 run, you'd have to recite pi for hours — 1.7 million digits is longer than any human has ever memorized. The current recitation record, set by Rajveer Meena in 2015, is 70,000 digits. Even that champion would fall short of the seventh 9 by a factor of more than twenty.

What's still open to argue

Pi is widely believed to be *normal* — meaning every finite string of digits, including a billion consecutive 9s, should eventually appear, and appear with the "expected" frequency. If that's true, the long wait between six 9s and seven 9s is just ordinary luck, the kind of gap probability predicts.

But no one has ever proven pi is normal. It remains one of the oldest unsolved questions about the most studied number in mathematics. So the Feynman point is more than a curiosity — it's a small window onto a pattern we can measure precisely and still cannot fully explain.