re: #98 Ojoe

Pi is a disgusting number, I think, but it is certainly not 3.

Bucky Fuller was led to the invention of the geodesic dome from the starting point that he hated the number Pi.

He started playing around with “the closest packing of spheres” to see for himself that nature did not really contain the number Pi.

This led him to some useful discoveries.

I was being facetious. As a matter of fact, I use Pi as my logo partially because I’ve memorized it out to 400 digits after the decimal point!

I can’t imagine finding Pi “disgusting” or “hating” Pi. It’s a number and it has its uses! Tell me, are there people out there who “hate” hammers or find hammers “disgusting”?

I wanted a memory challenge a while back, and Pi worked for what I was trying to do, so I memorized it. Beyond that, I don’t feel much of anything for this numeric tool.

re: #320 Ojoe

Pi never stops. It’s a nightmare.

Pi is a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter, right? So, we’re looking for a relationship between a curved line and a straight line.

The fact that the number goes on forever, instead of being a particular value, is somewhat akin to saying that you can’t definitively define the curve in terms of the straight line. It’s almost like Pi is telling us the curve and the straight line are from 2 different worlds.

That said, we can limit the number of digits we need for a particular task:

Are you a…

…high school student doing geometry? You’ll probably only need 1-2 digits.
…college math student? You’ll probably only need 3-4 digits.
…mechanical engineer? You’ll probably only need 6 digits.
…architect? You’ll probably only need 8 digits.

By the time you get to 40 digits, we’re talking circles with a circumference measured in the hundreds of millions of light years and diameters measured to the nearest proton. Anything beyond 40 is really only useful for challenging your memory or testing a computer’s speed and accuracy.

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