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The ultimate value of PI
Well, let's get right to the point: Pi has 1.3511 trillion digits, according to a Japanese team of researchers at Tokyo University, led by Professor Yasumasa Kanada, that calculated the value for pi with a Hitachi supercomputer for over 500 hours in April.
"Probably no symbol in mathematics has evoked as much mystery, romanticism, misconception, and human interest as the number pi," said David Blatner, author of The Joy of Pi. "It is the ultimate limitless vista serving as inspiration to mathematicians the world over. With our world so rudely circumscribed, how are we to continue? What point is there in going on if even pi has a limit?" So let's get a lethal dose of some weird chemical substance and wait for death reading the Tokyo Telephone Directory (complete edition). Straight Dope has put the important questions: Who was the first person to realize the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter is constant? Who was the first person to realize the fundamental importance of this ratio in finding other quantities, such as areas and volumes? And finally, who was the first person to use the Greek letter p to designate this ratio? The answers, respectively, are "I don't know," "I'm not sure," and "It's complicated." Rather dismaying answers, to be sure. As to the first question,
SD says that "The earliest known written records to throw light
on the subject are the Susa mathematical tablets, written in cuneiform
about 2000 B.C., and discovered in the 1930s at the site of the
ancient city of Susa (now known as Shush, Iran, but try to keep
it quiet). At least one Babylonian tablet states that the ratio
of the circumference of a circle to the perimeter of an inscribed
hexagon is (in modern notation) 1:0.96, implying a value of p=3.125,
a value that is too small by about half a percent." The second
answer takes us to the Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes
(about 250 B.C.), and the third is not so complicated, after all:
"The first writer to use p alone to stand for 3.14… was
the Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706 in his Synopsis palmariorum
matheseos", says SD, but it adds that "It was left to
the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler to popularize ?. Before
1736 he used the letter p to represent the ratio, but in that year,
he started using ? (for Latin peripheria) instead. It is not known
if he was influenced by Jones in this usage. Euler introduced a
great many other symbols that are still in use, for example, e (the
base of the natural system of logarithms), i (for the square root
of negative one), ? (Greek capital sigma, for the sum of a series),
? (Greek capital delta, for a finite difference) and f(x) (for a
function of x)." Almost anything you may want to know about Pi is here: Pi on the Web "The number pi has played a big role throughout history in
mathematics. I have also found that it plays a major role on the
internet, so I wrote an internet pi tour to help mathematics students
and others find the best material about it for whatever their interests
are." Tour Ask Dr. Math Friends of Pi Club Pi through the ages And so on, at the address http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~swalsh/Math%20Articles/Pi.html "We thoroughly condemn the slanderous allegation that pi has a limit," said an angry Rolf Umbridge, of the Ancient and Honorable Society of Pi Watchers. "We are so incensed by the very notion that we hereby officially censure the University of Tokyo. Dr. Kanada, you are dead to me, sir!" Related news:
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They
were seeking to break their own world record. The Hitachi supercomputer
is capable of 2 trillion calculations per second. The result of
this operation was so stunning that it was made three times in a
row, with the same result. The millionth digit is 1, a fact that
all numerologists of the world worship as a Revelation (and maybe
this will be the key of the plot of a future picture by Mell Gibson,
which will open with the astrologer cum physicist Isaac Newton sleeping
under an apple-tree to the hushing sound of a synthesized Also Spracht
Zarathustra, and spoken in Sumerian with subtitles in binary code.
This first scene will fade to the Black Monolith which will be slowly
transmogrified into a Leonardo da Vinci drawing of an open-armed
man inside a circle. A must). Makoto Kudo, of Kanada's team, realized
what a killjoy the whole thing was, and said: "We just wanted
to get to 1.5 trillion places. We intended no harm." (Insert
picture of Japanese scientist bowing to the audience?).
