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The Magic of “Pi”
January 29th, 2011Let’s start with the circle – can there be a more simple shape. Just take any point, andmap out all the other points on a plane that are at some fixed distance from it. And youget a circle.The word itself is from the Greek for circle – kirkos (Oddly enough, the word “circus”comes from the same root). Of course, our ancestors were familiar with the circle muchbefore they had any language. In nature, they could see the moon, and the sun. Whenthey cut a tree, they could see that the trunk had a circular cross-section. They inventedthe wheel – so they knew about the shape. And they believed it to be a symbol ofperfection.So there you have it – a simple shape, nothing seemingly complicated about it. A point.Another set of points that are equidistant from it. What could be simpler?Ah, but in this seeming simplicity lie some wonderful things. Let’s just take one of them – the number “pi”.What is pi, you ask. Well, it’s just the ratio of the circle’s circumference to it’s diameter.This ratio is the same for all circles – no matter how large or how small.So what is the value of this number?This is where the story starts to get strange. When you were in 3rd grade, you wereprobably told that the value of this number, this “pi” is 3 (which makes sense, you reallydidn’t know much about decimal numbers at that point). Then in grade 4 or so, whenyou got used to fractions and decimals, you were probably told to use the value 22/7 or3.14 for this value to solve problems.Here’s the funny part – although we can define what this number is (remember – ratio ofthe circumference to diameter of any circle) we can’t tell the exact value of the number.Sure, we know that goes something like “3.1415926535,,,” but there is no precise value.The part after the decimal point never ends. It goes on and on into infinity, and thenumbers don’t repeat. What this means is, unlike a fraction like 1/3, which is also infinite(0.333333…) we can’t get a repeating pattern that lets us predict what, for example, thebillionth digit after the decimal is (for 1/3, the billionth, or trillionth digit after the decimalpoint is always going to be “3
″
). It must be said that mathematicians recently have comeup with some clever tricks that let you compute the value of any digit of the value of pi
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