A few fascinating ideas about Pi (according to mathematicians)
Pi is a mathematical number, popularly approximated using 3.14 and symbolized with the Greek letter đťťż, pronounced pi. March 14 or 03/14 is called Pi day.
First, a bit of history. White historians may lead you to believe that Pi was discovered by white people, which is not true. The Original peoples of the earth, who are not white, had advanced civilizations, advanced knowledge of math and science, long before the white man did. Everywhere he went, he found signs of this. You cannot build an advanced civilization without knowing something as basic as the value or Pi or what it represents. White people got their knowledge of math and science from their travels to Asia and Africa, not the other way around. So, no, Pi was not discovered by white people. They may or may not have known the approximation to the trillionth digit, but that isn’t something you need for accurate scientific calculations and advanced civilizations. According to Livescience.com, NASA only uses the first 16 digits for most of their calculations.
What is Pi, exactly?
Pi, by the way, is the circumference of any circle divided by it’s diameter. It’s not hard to prove this.
A Super Simple Way to Calculate Pi
Take any circle, say the bottom of a jar or the top to a jar. Find the circumference by measuring around the jar or top with a measuring tape. Then, measure the diameter on the bottom of the jar or across the top to the jar, a line straight thru the center of the circle, from one end to the other. Divide the circumference by the diameter. For example, if your circumference is 22 and your diameter is 7, you would put the following into the calculator: 22Ă·7. If your answer isn’t 3.14, it’s because your measurements weren’t accurate enough. But, it should be close. A bigger circle will probably get a more accurate answer.
How Many Digits Are There?
Speaking of the trillionth digit of pi, just how many digits are there? Well, Pi is a kind of special number, in a special category known as irrational. Irrational numbers have these properties—they have a decimal value that never ends, never falls into a repeating decimal pattern and you cannot express them using a fraction. You can approximate them using a fraction, as in the common approximation for Pi, 22/7. But this does not equal pi, because there is NO known finite decimal number that equals pi. The best anyone can give at this time is only an approximation, no matter how many digits they find. This is why someone can calculate pi to the trillionth digit to the to the right of the decimal point and someone else come along and say, I found a longer approximation!
Another fascination idea about pi: because it has an infinite number of digits, with no repeating pattern, some where in that never ending stream of digits you can probably find almost any number you can think of. Your birthday, month, day and year? It probably occurs as a string of digits somewhere in Pi.
Here is a website to try this out on your own!
Other Places to Find Pi
People think of Pi only when talking about circles. Well, circles are everywhere! There are circles in bottles, cans, balls, ice cream cones, the sun, pipes, and a stream of water coming out of a circular faucet. Everyone one of these contains a circle and uses pi in some way to describe it.
Well, that’s all for now. Hope you found this interesting and maybe learned a little something too! Thanks for reading.
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