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The magic of Pi (pi)

Article  in  QJM: monthly journal of the Association of Physicians · March 2009

DOI: 10.1093/qjmed/hcp008 · Source: PubMed

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Q J Med 2009; 102:439–440
doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcp008 Advance Access publication 18 February 2009
Coda
The magic of Pi (p)
Pi can be taken as a symbol for one’s education.
The deeper one goes into it the more mysterious it
becomes and the more ramifications one can find.
You can go as far with pi as your abilities can take
you. Pi is first met in elementary geometry at school
and it occurs in one of the first equations that
you can solve; that is to find the circumference or
areas of circles. For pi you substitute the fraction
22/7 and the answer comes out right enough to
satisfy the school master. In the sixth form when
doing finite and infinite series you learn that
there does not appear to be an exact number for
pi. Although it is a simple ratio of the circumference
of a circle to its diameter, the decimal places
appear to go on forever. This is not too unfamiliar
because you have learnt that the decimal places for
such fractions as 1/3 or 1/9 go on as 0.333. . . or
0.111. . . recurring. But pi cannot even be expressed
as a definite fraction. Now if you consider a number
line scaled from 0 to 5 Units you would imagine that
pi would occupy a definite position lying some-
where between 3.1415 and 3.1416 and that it could
be defined accurately. Taking the half-way point at
3.14155 might be it. No—so you go on taking
smaller and smaller intervals and using each time
the half-way point to be pi, accumulating more and
more decimal points but you never seem to arrive at
the exact number. In 1966, pi was calculated on an
IBM 7030 computer to 500 000 decimal places. In
1994, the calculation was run out to a billion
decimal places; there were no recurring motifs and
leads one to believe that there is no finite number of
digits for pi. The numbers on such a line appear to
be continuous and there are no gaps between them;
so you can go on dividing ever smaller intervals to
infinity.
At university I was astonished to be shown the
relationship of pi to Euler’s
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi exponential e and the
imaginary number (i),
1. The tutor produced it
like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a top hat:
pffiffiffiffiffi
e

1 ¼
1:
! The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Physicians.
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Incidentally this has been voted by some mathema-
ticians to be the most beautiful equation of their
whole subject.
Why on earth should there be such a simple
connection between pi and e? It has nothing to do
with circles. Euler’s e like pi is an irrational number
(i.e. cannot be written in the form of a fraction a/b)
and its value cannot be given exactly; to five
decimal
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi places it is 2.71828. And why is the

1
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi involved? I have always felt uneasy about

1. Is it just a fudge factor to make it possible to
find the square roots of minus numbers? I know
exactly what the number p means
ffiffiffi in two books or
three apples; and also the 4papples ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi means some-
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thing. But what does the
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1 apples mean?
Physicists tell you
1 is a number reflecting
‘real’ life too; and it is a most useful quantity to study
rotating vectors, alternating currents or analysis of
other wave forms.
Does pi come into medicine? We all use the
normal (or Gaussian) distribution to work out the
student’s t-test for the probability values of our
observations. This bell-shaped curve approaches the
horizontal axis without ever quite reaching it. Yet,
the total area under the curve can be accurately
determined by a method of advanced calculus
involving double integrals (which is beyond me);
and it works out to involve the square root of pi. This
Gaussian integral (or probability integral) of the
standard normal distribution can be expressed as:
The area under the curve
Z1
2 pffiffiffi
f ðxÞ ¼ e
x dx ¼


1
Such a strange way to come across pi again makes it
look quite scary. Does pi really have magical
properties?
Going to 2000 BC there is a clay tablet written in
cuneiform script that is on display at the current
 440
exhibition on Babylon in the British Museum. The
tablet shows you how to calculate the areas of
squares, rectangles and circles and was probably
used as architectural exercises for students. The
tablet states that the perimeter of a regular hexagon
approximates to the circumference of a circum-
scribed circle; and that to calculate the area of the
circle you need to employ a ‘circle ratio’ (the symbol
pi was not used until the 18th century). The ‘circle
ratio’ came out as 31/8, a slight underestimation of
the true value. The Babylonians were perhaps
hampered by using 60 as a base system for counting
rather than 10; which lingers on to this day with
60 min to the hour and 3608 to turn a full circle.
This idea of calculating pi by using polygons to
work out the circumference of a circle to any
desired degree of accuracy was taken up by
Archimedes (287–212 BC) of Syracuse. In his book
On the Measurements of Circles instead of just using
a hexagon to circumscribe the circle like the
Babylonians, he used regular polygons of n sides
inscribed within a circle as smaller than the
circumference, whereas the perimeter of a similar
polygon circumscribed outside the circle is taken as
greater than the circumference. By making n
sufficiently large, the two perimeters of the polygons
will approach the true circumference of the circle,
one from above, the other from below. Archimedes
started with the hexagon and progressively doubled
the number of sides to a polygon of 96 sides. The
diameter of the circle was easy to measure; so he
obtained a value for pi, expressed as an inequality:
310 <
< 317:
71
As far as I understand Euclid (300 BC) con-
tributed nothing original to pi. His Elements system-
atize the mathematical knowledge available to him.
But he is not the father of geometry; he is more the
father of mathematical rigour and logical thinking.
The first four books of the Elements often turn up on
the school syllabus and Book 3 deals with the
properties of circles. All his theorems can be derived
from his five basic postulates or axioms but nothing
new is added to the ‘circle ratio’.
After the Greeks, pi took a rest for a while.
Fibonacci and Galileo worked on it half-heartedly.
But gradually ways of calculating pi by using series
were discovered. For a giant like Newton
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(1642–1727) calculating pi was a chicken feed
and in his Method of Fluxions he shows in four lines
how to get a value of pi to 16 decimal places. The
series he uses converges on pi much more quickly
than the first of these series for pi co-discovered
by his rival Leibniz (1646–1716). Newton devotes
only a short paragraph to his series, apologizing for
such triviality with a ‘by the way’. He later writes
that ‘I am ashamed to tell you to how many places
I carried these computations’. His real business was
to work on the big problems of the Universal Laws
of Gravitation and the nature of light. The history of
calculating pi comes somewhat to an end with Euler
(1701–83). He produced formulas for calculating pi
by the dozens. To take just one example: the series
of inverse squares
1=12 þ1=22 þ1=32 . . .
had baffled mathematicians for decades. No one
had been able to find its sum until Euler showed it to
be p2/6. He went on to discover many more series
and expressions that summed to terms involving pi.
Although Euler had finished off one chapter in the
history of pi he opened up a new one. What sort of
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number is pi? We know it is irrational, but is it
transcendental as well? In other words, can pi be the
root of an algebraic equation of finite degree with
rational coefficients? It took another 100 years to
settle this question but the proof was not easy.
Lindemann’s proof of 1882 runs to 13 pages of
tough mathematics (not read by me) showing that pi
is indeed transcendental.
So in the end this little number of pi turns out to
be irrational, transcendental and its decimal places
may run to infinity. All big concepts for something
we met and used unthinkingly in our early school
days.
David Galton
Further reading
1. Beckman P. A History of Pi. New York, St. Martin’s Press,
1971.
2. Courant R, Robbins H. What is Mathematics. London, OUP,
1963.
3. Ogilvy CS. Excursions in Mathematics. New York, Dover
Publications, 1984.