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The Craziest Thing You’ll Ever Learn About Pi

March 15th, 2008 | Mathematics | Science

pi

First off, happy pi day.

According to a physicist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the number Pi has been calculated out to over one trillion digits. But that’s not the interesting part.

As it turns out, it’s totally overkill to get that precise with it. Dividing 22 by 7 gives an estimate that works for most everyday needs, such as carpentry and construction (it’s roughly 99% accurate). And calculating pi out to only 39 places gives truly astronomical precision.

Using pi calculated out to only 39 decimal places would allow one to compute the circumference of the entire universe to the accuracy of less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Holy crap. So, yeah…I guess 39 places will be “good enough” then…

Oh, and just for a bit of trivia, Albert Einstein’s birthday is today, and he was a big fan of pi. But that’s not it. His birthday, like pi day, also falls on March 14th — otherwise known as 3.14. Einstein’s birthday on 3.14. Coincidence? I don’t think so. We all know God doesn’t play dice.:

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[ Thanks to NPR's Science Friday for the excellent show today! ]

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← Older Comments
  • Mark Sporr

    Come on now. Only 4% of the planet uses a date format that puts the month before the day. Most of the rest of the world outside of North America uses day/month/year. Certainly, Albert (a European) would have done and would therefore have considered his birthday as 14.3 – hardly “pi” related at all!

  • Jfrisby

    Actually, there is a very good reason to calculate pi beyond 39 places: Error compounding. When calculating trajectories for say, simulating stellar bodies, one uses a discrete timestep simulation and the finer the timestep the better the accuracy / easier certain problems become (in general). However, the finer the timestep the more calculations are involved. The more calculations are involved, the more error is accrued (since the next calculation uses the previous as the basis) when an imprecise value of constants like pi are used. (We won’t even get into what happens when floating point is used…)

  • TLIL

    i know over 70 pi radius decimal points ;)

    • bazkie

      only 40 here :[ i feel like a n00b! :p

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