Lecture: p

 

Pi, as you know  is the ratio between the distance around a circle (circumference) and the distance across the circle (diameter). Most people would say pi is 3.141 something something something. Rather, it goes on forever. I only know the first 18 decimals of pi from memory. 3.141592653589793238. if you want to memorize more digits of pi, you can try http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~hnn/pi.html.

 

People have tried to approximate pi over the years. Arranged chronologically, this is what people have done:

 

Year	Person(s)	Place	Fraction	Number of decimal places it is correct to
2000 BC	Babylonians	Babylon	25/8	1
1650 BC	Ahmes	Egypt	(16/9)^2 (squared)	1
212 BC	Archimedes	Greece	223/71	2 (jeez…)
501 AD	Tsu Ch’ung-Chi	China	355/113	6 (getting better…)
1777 AD	Johann Lambert	Switzerland	103993/33102	9 (Go Johann!)
1980 AD	NZ high school students	Umm…isn’t it obvious?	22/7	2 (what a cheap rip-off! What have you done??!!)

 

 

Pi has been used as standard test to test how fast a computer is. Though, not the ordinary ones at home, but supercomputers predicting the weather and doing simulations, like what happens to a planet if so and so happens.

 

Pi – the classic number to waste your memory on.

 

If you want a wallpaper on the digits of pi, click here.