Natural, irrational and consequential. Pi is not just a collection of random digits. It’s a journey, an experience, which you will decipher when you try to unveil it.
Other than Pi being everlasting, there are some other captivating facts about pi. Pi is believed to contain the numbers 0 to 9 in every combination possible. Your phone number, ATM pin and every other string of numbers you can imagine are in there somewhere. And if you convert letters to numbers (as in h-a-t to 8-1-20), then every piece of writing ever been written, including any essay you ever wrote or any of the works of Shakespeare, it’s all in there.
Pi day (3/14) was first proclaimed in 1988 by the prince of pi, Larry Shaw.
The idea of the relationship between a circle’s perimeter to its diameter goes back to the middle ages. In ancient times, mathematicians used a polygon-method to calculate pi. They added more and more sides to a polygon so that its area approached the area of a circle. Archimedes used a polygon with 96 sides. Many other mathematicians also used this method to compute this perpetual number. In China, a mathematician used over 3,000 sides in a polygon to arrive at the value 3.14159. Another mathematician used about 25,000 sides to calculate pi. Many mathematicians believe that it is more accurate to say that a circle has infinite corners than it is to say that it has none. It is only fair to assume that the infinite number of corners in a circle connects to the infinite number of digits of pi.
Talking about mathematics and not mentioning an Indian is a mortal sin. Though mathematicians have discovered over 30 trillion digits (to feel its immensity, u can think of it like this- if u recite each digit in one second, it will take you approximately 900,000 years to complete it), people racing to calculate more digits of pi is a never-ending competition. And to specify, the competition to memorize the pi digits is even more astonishing. The world record for reciting the most no. of digits belongs to Suresh Kumar Sharma a vegetable vendor from Jaipur, India. He was able to memorize the first 70,030 digits of pi (in nearly 17 hours) by linking each number with an image. Not only this but the top 5 record holders includes 4 Indians.
In precise, this perpetual decimal is in the ethos of mathematics. And here’s to all the budding mathematicians, A very Happy Pi Day. It’s a day that will forever be etched. Relativity. Revolution. Radiation. It’s the birth of Einstein. Death of Karl Marx and Stephen Hawkins. Three great minds. Three great contributions ( pun intended ). Probably, no symbol in mathematics has evoked so much as mystery, misconception and human interest as the number pi.
Pi is Maths and Maths is life 🙂
-Team Cev