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Wednesday 15 February 2017

Pi

Pi is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which is commonly approximated as 3.14159.

The circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times as long as its diameter.

HISTORY

Until 1706 the ratio of a circle's perimeter to its diameter was known as “the quantity which, when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference." The Greek letter pi was introduced as a simpler definition by the Welsh mathematician William Jones (1675- July 3, 1749) in his 1706 work Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos; or, a New Introduction to the Mathematics. He chose π the Greek for p as it was the first letter of “periphery” or “perimeter” which were the words then used for circumference.

William Jones by William Hogarth

A bill before the State Legislature of Indiana in 1897 tried to set the value of pi at 3.2. It was approved by the House, but not the Senate.

The publisher and writer John Taylor first proposed the idea that Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza, built around 2589 to 2566 B.C., was designed based on pi. Taylor found that the vertical height of the pyramid has the same relationship to the perimeter of its base as the radius of a circle has to its circumference. Other people have since made the link between the Great Pyramid and pi as well, although it may not have been intentional

DIGITS

Pi is an irrational number: its decimal value goes on for ever, never stopping or repeating.

British mathematician William Shanks famously took 15 years between 1858 and 1873 to calculate π to 707 digits, but made a mistake in the 528th digit, rendering all subsequent digits incorrect.

The value of pi was calculated to a world record 50 trillion digits by Timothy Mullican in Huntsville, Alabama, USA on January 29, 2020. Using a 2012-era computer (Ivy Bridge) along with a very large array of 48 modern hard drives. it took 10 months to complete the computation. 

The value of pi was calculated to a world record 62,831,853,071,796 digits by the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons in Chur, Switzerland, on August 19, 2021. Using a computer with one terabyte of RAM and 510 terabytes of disk space, they completed the calculation within 108 days. 

The value of pi was calculated to a world record 100 trillion digits on March 21, 2022 by Emma Haruka Iwao on Google Cloud. Iwao used the y-cruncher program to calculate the digits of pi. The program uses the Chudnovsky algorithm, which is a fast and accurate way to calculate pi. The calculation took 157 days to complete and used 515 terabytes of storage.

A pi pie. 

In an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Spock commands an evil super computer to compute pi to the last digit (which, you no doubt realize is highly illogical …).

The first 144 digits of pi add up to 666 (which many scholars say is “the mark of the Beast”). And 144 = (6+6) x (6+6).

If you list the first 360 digits of PI, the last 3 digits will be "360". PI comes from a circle which has 360 degrees.

You have to go to the 606th and 607th digits in the decimal expansion of pi (3.14159265…) before you see the number 68. Every other two-digit number occurs earlier in the value of pi.

According to two mathematicians, 39 digits of π are sufficient to perform most cosmological calculations, since that is the accuracy necessary to calculate the circumference of the observable universe with a precision of one atom.

The world record for memorizing the value of pi was set by Rajveer Meena at the VIT University, Vellore, India, on March 21, 2015. Rajveer, a resident of Mohocha village in Swaimodhapur district of Rajasthan, correctly recited from memory its first 70,000 digits. He wore a blindfold throughout the entire recall, which took him 9 hours 27 minutes.


FUN PI FACTS

Pi Day is celebrated around the world on March 14 or 3.14 and officially kicks off at 1:59 pm. When combined the date and time results in 3.14159, the approximate numerical value of pi.

A mosaic outside the Mathematics Building at the Technical University of Berlin. By Holger Motzkau - 

March 14 may be Pi Day but the ultimate Pi Day was March 14, 1592, or 3.14.1592 as the Americans write it, which has the first seven digits of pi.

When performing calculations for interplanetary navigation, NASA scientists only use Pi to the 15th decimal point. When calculating the circumference of a 25 billion mile (40 billion kms) wide circle, for instance, the calculation would only be off by 1.5 inches (38.1 mm).

If you write "3.14" on a piece of paper and hold it up to a mirror, it looks like the word "PIE".

You can remember the value of Pi (3.1415926) by counting the letters of each word in the phrase "May I have a large container of coffee?"

Source Daily Express

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