A Slice of Pi

  
   I find myself thinking about math more these days than ever before.  I have to admit that these past four weeks have been intense.  My brain has been inundated with math concepts to the point that I even ponder ideas having to do with math when I could be thinking of other things.
   After revisiting many formulas, I began wondering about the concept of Pi.  Where did it come from?  How long has the idea been around?  Who came up with it?  Was his last name "Pi?"  I'll answer that last question right away.  No, it wasn't.
   After doing some investigating, it seems that a mathematician named William Jones was the first to use the symbol for Pi, although he did not invent the concept of Pi.  According to an article on Math.com, "Ancient civilizations knew that there was a fixed ratio of circumference to diameter that was approximately equal to three.  The Greeks refined the process and Archimedes is credited with the first theoretical calculation of Pi." 
   I have been finding out that there are many people who have devoted their entire lives to the study of mathematics.  I wish I could have met them and been in the presence of such intelligence.  I also wish that one of them could sit next to me as I do my homework, but I digress. 

                                                                 William Jones
                                                   Photo courtesy of: en.wikipedia.org




   I found this very interesting article on some of those math-minded geniuses titled "5 brilliant mathematicians and their impact on the modern world."  It is very clear that the contributions of these five men; Isaac Newton, Carl Gauss, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Benoit Mandelbrot, helped to make our world what it is today.  We would not have the everyday lives that we currently have without them and without what their minds helped to develop.   Many of the gadgets that we have come to rely so heavily on; computers and cell phones to name just two, would not be possibilities without the math concepts that are foundational in their operations.

                                                                  Isaac Newton
                                                 Photo courtesy of: www.brighthub.com

   So back to this notion of Pi.  The number represented by the symbol Pi, or π, is 3.1415926... ...
and goes on...and on...and on...  Here is a list of the first 500 digits of Pi as taken from an article titled,"Memorize the Number Pi to 500 Places:" 


500 digits of pi, written as 50 digits in each row:

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751
05820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067
98214808651328230664709384460955058223172535940812
84811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819
64428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909
14564856692346034861045432664821339360726024914127
37245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643
67892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609
43305727036575959195309218611738193261179310511854
80744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491


Pretty amazing, isn't it?  Believe it or not, there have been many many people who have spent more time than we can imagine memorizing thousands and thousands of digits of Pi.  There's even a world record category for it.
   For those who have no desire to try to memorize the endless list of numbers in Pi, we can at least appreciate the old "Area equals Pi r squared" from elementary school.  The next time you're trying to figure out the area of a circle, you'll be serving up a slice of Pi with that formula.  If I were you I'd stop at 3.1415.  A little Pi goes a long way.