Pi
We're several billion decimal places closer to knowing the true value of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. And you thought maths wasn't fun.
1. Mmm ... pi. Fans of the phenomenon will be glad to know that researchers in Japan have come up with a world beater.
2. But there's no meat, fish or meringue involved. Instead it is a calculation of pi (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) to 1.2411 trillion places.
3. That is quite a lot: 3.141,592, 653, 589, 793, 238, 462, 643, 383, 279 and then some (to be inexact). But the lead researcher, Professor Yasumasa Kanada of Tokyo university, has done this kind of thing before (to a billion places - the previous record) and, if you so wish, you can download an etext of his calculation of pi to a million places, just to get a flavour.
4. Remember that pi is not a big number, no matter how many decimal places it runs to. Pi is less than four.
5. But no mathematical phenomenon has evoked as much "mystery, romanticism, misconception and human interest" as pi. Part of the attraction is that as an irrational number, it cannot be expressed as a fraction - which is why it never ends.
6. There is a Biblical value of pi - a much truncated 3, based on the specifications for the temple of Solomon - and there is evidence that the Egyptians had it down to 3.16.
7. The best offering from the ancient world was that of Archimedes of Syracuse, who constrained pi to between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71; a valuation which made it possible to solve many problems relating to circles.
8. Written as p, the 16th lower case letter of the Greek alphabet, pi exerts a strange power. There are some - such as Lancashire taxi driver Tom Morton - who aspire to recite more of pi off by heart than anyone else.
9. March 14 (3.14 in the US) is pi day - so get together with your friends (or play it safe and cobble together a load of lonely strangers you will never have to see again) and sing some pi songs. But many devotees prefer its rather imperfect fractional expression (22/7) and so mark pi approximation day on July 22 (22/7).
10. The 1995 celebrations at one US university are documented online: "Most people celebrated the day by eating waffles," a participant writes. "There was also some reasoning about how circles would look, if the ratio of their circumference to their diameter would equal 3 ... Viktor's theory was that they'd kind of be oval." Mmm ... oval pies.
1. Mmm ... pi. Fans of the phenomenon will be glad to know that researchers in Japan have come up with a world beater.
2. But there's no meat, fish or meringue involved. Instead it is a calculation of pi (the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter) to 1.2411 trillion places.
3. That is quite a lot: 3.141,592, 653, 589, 793, 238, 462, 643, 383, 279 and then some (to be inexact). But the lead researcher, Professor Yasumasa Kanada of Tokyo university, has done this kind of thing before (to a billion places - the previous record) and, if you so wish, you can download an etext of his calculation of pi to a million places, just to get a flavour.
4. Remember that pi is not a big number, no matter how many decimal places it runs to. Pi is less than four.
5. But no mathematical phenomenon has evoked as much "mystery, romanticism, misconception and human interest" as pi. Part of the attraction is that as an irrational number, it cannot be expressed as a fraction - which is why it never ends.
6. There is a Biblical value of pi - a much truncated 3, based on the specifications for the temple of Solomon - and there is evidence that the Egyptians had it down to 3.16.
7. The best offering from the ancient world was that of Archimedes of Syracuse, who constrained pi to between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71; a valuation which made it possible to solve many problems relating to circles.
8. Written as p, the 16th lower case letter of the Greek alphabet, pi exerts a strange power. There are some - such as Lancashire taxi driver Tom Morton - who aspire to recite more of pi off by heart than anyone else.
9. March 14 (3.14 in the US) is pi day - so get together with your friends (or play it safe and cobble together a load of lonely strangers you will never have to see again) and sing some pi songs. But many devotees prefer its rather imperfect fractional expression (22/7) and so mark pi approximation day on July 22 (22/7).
10. The 1995 celebrations at one US university are documented online: "Most people celebrated the day by eating waffles," a participant writes. "There was also some reasoning about how circles would look, if the ratio of their circumference to their diameter would equal 3 ... Viktor's theory was that they'd kind of be oval." Mmm ... oval pies.
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