![]() It’s a little high compared with the current value – 3.141592653589793238462643383279502… plus another 22 trillion digits and counting – but it’s a pretty good effort for someone working by hand more than 2000 years ago.īut how do you program a modern computer to calculate increasingly accurate values of π? And how do you know that even the best computer will never quite nail it? The answers arise from the curiosity of earlier mathematicians who wanted to understand the deeper nature of this mysterious number, just for its own sake. If you divide 22 by 7 by hand, you get the repeating decimal 3.142857142857142857… Remarkably, they found that no matter what size the circle, this ratio is always around three.īy approximating circles with straight-line segments, various early mathematicians around the world – from ancient Greece to mediaeval China, India and the Middle East – used repeated applications of Pythagoras’s theorem to work out better and better values, beginning with Archimedes’s 22/ 7, which many of us learned at school. ![]() This history also reveals that π itself is “everywhere”, not just in the geometry of simple circles.įirst, a brief shout out to the ancient peoples who experimented with strings and sticks to work out the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The theme this year is “Mathematics is Everywhere” – from modelling economic and social systems, to the maths underlying the GPS, MRI and CT scans, AI, cosmology, and much, much more.īut here I want to celebrate this theme in a different way, by offering a peek at the amazing multicultural history of the mathematics underlying your computer’s estimates of. There’ll be various educational and public celebrations around the world, and you can find details on the IDM website. So it’s a special day indeed for mathematicians, and late last year UNESCO voted to declare it the official International Day of Mathematics (IDM). Einstein’s mathematical insight led to a revolution in our understanding of reality, and ultimately to one of the greatest recent discoveries in science: gravity waves. Infinity is an awesome concept that we can never quite grasp, so it’s no wonder that π has such a tantalising imaginative pull.īut there’s even more to the significance of March 14, because it is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. The idea that you need a seemingly random infinite string of digits to “calculate” a tangible, finite circumference or area is strange, to say the least! That’s because π is an irrational number: it cannot be expressed as a fraction – as a ratio of whole numbers – and this means it doesn’t have a finite decimal form, or even an infinitely repeating one such as 0.33333… (= 1/3). Computers offer much more precision, with trillions more decimal places, but even these are approximations. My basic scientific calculator has 3.141592653 as its inbuilt value for π. Pi is famous as the mysterious number that relates the radius of a circle to its circumference and area, even though π itself slips through our fingers as soon as we try to pin it down. That’s because writing this date as 3/14 brings to mind the first three digits of π (pronounced pi). ![]() You’ve probably heard of “pi day”, informally celebrated in several countries on March 14. Ukrainian mathematician becomes the second female Fields Medal recipient.Pi Approximation Day – what’s behind the magic? (Hint maths not apples).Honouring forgotten women scientists, mathematicians, programmers and palaeontologists. ![]()
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