Another year has come full circle.
Here's an aerial photo of one of my ponds.
Licensed Land Surveyor
Finger Lakes Region, Upstate New York
Cool pond did you creat it?
About Pi:
"What is pi ( )? Who first used pi? How do you find its value? What is it for? How many digits is it?
By definition, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi is always the same number, no matter which circle you use to compute it.For the sake of usefulness people often need to approximate pi. For many purposes you can use 3.14159, which is really pretty good, but if you want a better approximation you can use a computer to get it. Here's pi to many more digits: 3.14159265358979323846.
The area of a circle is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or "pi r squared":
A = pi*r^2
A very brief history of pi
Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn't know its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that it was a little bigger than 3; the Babylonians had an approximation of 3 1/8 (3.125), and the Egyptians had a somewhat worse approximation of 4*(8/9)^2 (about 3.160484), which is slightly less accurate and much harder to work with. For more, see A History of Pi by Petr Beckman (Dorset Press).The modern symbol for pi [ ] was first used in our modern sense in 1706 by William Jones, who wrote:
There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of particular Curve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitate the Practice; as for instance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to(16/5 - 4/239) - 1/3(16/5^3 - 4/239^3) + ... = 3.14159... = (see A History of Mathematical Notation by Florian Cajori).
Pi (rather than some other Greek letter like Alpha or Omega) was chosen as the letter to represent the number 3.141592... because the letter [ ] in Greek, pronounced like our letter 'p', stands for 'perimeter'.
About Pi
Pi is an infinite decimal. Unlike numbers such as 3, 9.876, and 4.5, which have finitely many nonzero numbers to the right of the decimal place, pi has infinitely many numbers to the right of the decimal point.If you write pi down in decimal form, the numbers to the right of the 0 never repeat in a pattern. Some infinite decimals do have patterns - for instance, the infinite decimal .3333333... has all 3's to the right of the decimal point, and in the number .123456789123456789123456789... the sequence 123456789 is repeated. However, although many mathematicians have tried to find it, no repeating pattern for pi has been discovered - in fact, in 1768 Johann Lambert proved that there cannot be any such repeating pattern.
As a number that cannot be written as a repeating decimal or a finite decimal (you can never get to the end of it) pi is irrational: it cannot be written as a fraction (the ratio of two integers).
Pi shows up in some unexpected places like probability, and the 'famous five' equation connecting the five most important numbers in mathematics, 0, 1, e, pi, and i:e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.
Computers have calculated pi to many decimal places. It's easy to find lists of them by Googling 'digits of pi'."
FL/GA PLS., post: 362180, member: 379 wrote: Cool pond did you creat it?
It is a manmade pond that was dug a few years back during a Wetland Reserve Program construction project in a mostly reed canary grass monoculture marsh in a river bottom.
I can't really take any credit for it--it was just the creative flow of the excavation contractor as he moved his timber mats around and did what he could do to place the spoils upland. But it has always been called "Pi" since the first day I saw it. North is even up on the aerial photo. It would have been hard to plan it any better.
Licensed Land Surveyor
Finger Lakes Region, Upstate New York
Public Service Announcement...
The 17th most common 10-digit password is 3141592654
just for fun:
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/
Cherry, Coconut Creme or Triple Chocolate Death please!!
Peter Ehlert, post: 362227, member: 60 wrote: Public Service Announcement...
The 17th most common 10-digit password is 3141592654
just for fun:
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/
ÛÏThis article is not intended to be a hacker bible, or to be used as a utility, resource, or tool to help would-be thieves perform nefarious actions.Û
Well that piqued my interest.
The hacking tools are scary.
Thanks for the link! B-)
Pi is wrong. We should be working with tau:
Saw a t-shirt one day: ö?-1 23 ¬? tt
[USER=413]@RADAR[/USER] I was waiting for that one. Love it.
The article Peter linked is a little overstated in using the word "wrong" but I agree with their premise. I've thought for years that the proper constant in mathematics is the ratio of circumference to radius, 6.28... and not that of the circumference to diameter 3.14...
Anyone who has taken multiple higher math, engineering, or physics courses has gotten tired of writing 2pi in all the formulas and punching the extra button on the calculator. About the only common formula that uses pi is the diameter formula itself.
Though I failed to wear it today (it is Monday, I was rushed, I didn't sleep well last night, whatever), I have a "Cherry Pi" shirt that I typically wear on this day.
It has a bunch of digits of pi.
And this site ( http://www.facade.com/legacy/amiinpi/ ) will tell you if your birthday appears in the digits of pi (and where in the string of infinite, non-repeating digits).
Now, to go home and see if we have any pie at home because this is making me hungry.
i 8 what? I got lost on the second half of the shirt message.
Having a working knowledge of radians, or RAD, does not qualify one as being rad. In fact, more like the exact opposite of rad, whatever that term might be. Unrad? Nonrad? Radless?
My wife is a bookkeeper and one of her clients is a small shop that creates and sells very expensive skin care products. The owner is a chemist and she put an add in the local business weekly that for every number of Pi a customer could recite from memory past 3.1415... they would get $1 towards the purchase of any of her products.
314159 would get you $1.
3141592 would get you $2.
A fellow came in a recited 125 digits from memory until he screwed up. Said he was a mathematician. He brought his elderly mom in and she had quite the shopping spree. The owner was delighted. Total math geek.
skwyd, post: 362343, member: 6874 wrote: Though I failed to wear it today (it is Monday, I was rushed, I didn't sleep well last night, whatever), I have a "Cherry Pi" shirt that I typically wear on this day.
It has a bunch of digits of pi.
And this site ( http://www.facade.com/legacy/amiinpi/ ) will tell you if your birthday appears in the digits of pi (and where in the string of infinite, non-repeating digits).
For those who did not see where their birthday is in this link, you missed this obvious fact, that pi is not really a big number..........
It has been brought to my attention that PI is not really all that "big", per se -- 4 being given as an example of a number bigger than PI. I could argue that PI is bigger than an infinite number of numbers (-5 for example) but, in truth, that is kinda wimpy and misleading. It turns out that when I was thinking "big" I was thinking of all the space that was used when writing PI down. The stack of papers required to write down PI is much bigger than the stack to write down 1 million. All that said doesn't take away the fact that there was actual confusion regarding the statement of PI being a big number -- therefore, you should ignore that I called PI the big number that begins with three and instead consider PI to be the really long number that begins with three.
Ken Salzmann, post: 362397, member: 398 wrote: For those who did not see where their birthday is in this link, you missed this obvious fact, that pi is not really a big number..........
It has been brought to my attention that PI is not really all that "big", per se -- 4 being given as an example of a number bigger than PI. I could argue that PI is bigger than an infinite number of numbers (-5 for example) but, in truth, that is kinda wimpy and misleading. It turns out that when I was thinking "big" I was thinking of all the space that was used when writing PI down. The stack of papers required to write down PI is much bigger than the stack to write down 1 million. All that said doesn't take away the fact that there was actual confusion regarding the statement of PI being a big number -- therefore, you should ignore that I called PI the big number that begins with three and instead consider PI to be the really long number that begins with three.
I read a book back in 5th grade called The Phantom Tollbooth. Definitely a kids book, but it was very entertaining and I would probably still read it today (if I had spare time to devote to reading novels again). Anyway, at one point, the main character (Milo) was in a place called Digitopolis and he asked the Mathemagician what the biggest number was. The Mathemagician opened a door into a huge room that had a ridiculously tall number 3. (At least I think it was 3). Milo said that maybe he wanted to see the longest number there was. Another door opened into another room with an absurdly long, stretched out 8. Milo realized that he didn't know how to express what he wanted to see, that being the number with the greatest possible magnitude.
And so, pi can be "big" if you write the numerals very large, say one per page. Or it can be "long" if you stretch out the numerals so that they take up more lateral space (or just write out a whole bunch of them). In any case, I think pi is big in importance and large in the minds of the public on 3/14!
