Pi pops up where you don’t expect it
Happy Pi Day, where we celebrate the world’s most famous number. The exact value of π=3.14159… has fascinated people since ancient times, and mathematicians have computed trillions of digits. But why do we care? Would it actually matter if somebody got the 11,137,423,895,285th digit wrong?
Probably not. The world would keep on turning (with a circumference of 2πr). What matters about π isn’t so much the actual value as the idea, and the fact that π seems to crop up in lots of unexpected places.
Let’s start with the expected places. If a circle has radi
Happy Pi Day, where we celebrate the world’s most famous number. The exact value of π=3.14159… has fascinated people since ancient times, and mathematicians have computed trillions of digits. But why do we care? Would it actually matter if somebody got the 11,137,423,895,285th digit wrong?
Probably not. The world would keep on turning (with a circumference of 2πr). What matters about π isn’t so much the actual value as the idea, and the fact that π seems to crop up in lots of unexpected places.
Let’s start with the expected places. If a circle has radi
1 month ago
