{"id":6407,"date":"2015-03-13T22:08:32","date_gmt":"2015-03-14T05:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6407"},"modified":"2015-03-17T22:13:03","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T05:13:03","slug":"why-pi-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2015\/03\/13\/why-pi-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Pi Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Why Pi Matters<\/h1>\n

BY\u00a0STEVEN STROGATZ<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach.\u00a0<\/span>CREDIT<\/span>PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY COOLIDGE \/ GETTY<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Every March 14th, mathematicians like me are prodded out of our burrows like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day, blinking and bewildered by all the fuss. Yes, it\u2019s Pi Day again. And not just any Pi Day. They\u2019re calling this the Pi Day of the century: 3.14.15. Pi to five digits. A once-in-a-lifetime thing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m dreading it. No hope of solving any equations that day, what with the\u00a0pie-eating contests<\/a>, the bickering over the merits of\u00a0pi versus tau<\/a>\u00a0(pi times two), and the throwdowns over who can\u00a0recite more digits of pi<\/a>. Just stay off the streets at 9:26:53, when the time will approximate pi to ten places: 3.141592653.<\/p>\n

Pi does deserve a celebration, but for reasons that are rarely mentioned. In high school, we all learned that pi is about circles. Pi is the ratio of a circle\u2019s circumference (the distance around the circle, represented by the letter\u00a0C<\/em>) to its diameter (the distance across the circle at its widest point, represented by the letter\u00a0d<\/em>). That ratio, which is about 3.14, also appears in the formula for the area inside the circle,\u00a0A<\/em>\u00a0=\u00a0\u03c0r<\/em>2<\/span>, where\u00a0\u03c0<\/em>\u00a0is the Greek letter \u201cpi\u201d and\u00a0r<\/em>\u00a0is the circle\u2019s radius (the distance from center to rim). We memorized these and similar formulas for the S.A.T.s and then never again used them, unless we happened to go into a technical field, or until our own kids took geometry.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s fair to ask: Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. Even young children get this. The digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. They go on forever, seemingly at random\u2014except that they can\u2019t possibly be random, because they embody the order inherent in a perfect circle. This tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New Yorker Why Pi Matters BY\u00a0STEVEN STROGATZ The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach.\u00a0CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY COOLIDGE \/ GETTY Every March 14th, mathematicians like me are prodded out of our burrows like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day, blinking and bewildered by all the fuss. Yes, it\u2019s Pi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}