Like π?

Incidentally, today is Pi Day. So have a happy Pi/pie filled March 14th.

My calculus teacher mentioned that, too.

When you see some blue text, it might be a link. (same link as in #52)

Thanks ! I did not notice the coloured text...  in #52.    And, by the way I now have something new for me to read...

in indiana, it is the law that pi =4

Actually, if you check back on my argument, the proof is perfectly clear.

There is absolutely no rounding. These are precise measurements.

Pi simply = 3. 

There can be no disproof, and no argument is possible.

Q.E.D.

I'll have a pie with a Guinness on St Patrick's Day.

I like pi, all the students in my class are impressed that i memorized 350 digits! It's kinda fun but i stopped waste of time.

@Ubik42 : do you know why the Indiana Pi Bill never made it to an official law or act ? Because a mathematician was in that meeting and immediately torpedo'd the plan, as being a mistake / an error  to think that pi was other than 3,141593...                                                                                      So I now invite a mathematician under the readers of this forum to be arbiter and to explain what pi is.                                                             And, by the way, don't attack me on my use of the English language here above, I have to use a dictionary, you know !

To understand pi, you need to understand infinity.  Every posible number combination to the 30 billionth digit, every possible line of binary code, and every number sequence you have used in a math equation (3.14159265 would be 314159265).  When you turn the first 26 numbers into letters, you have every word spoken, written, and yet to be invented.  You have every book written down an infinite number of times, in every language.  Your social securiy number is in pi, as is everyone else's, an infinite number of times, and in some places, billions of times in a row.  Back to the binary code part, you have the entire coding of this website in binary code, and all of the mysteries of the universe answered in pi.  Pi is everything, and it cannot be merely rounded up to a single digit when there is an infinite number of digits.  It would be like trying to hold back a tsunami with a wall of paper.  You can't begin to comprehend pi until you can comprehend this.

Pi is just some real number which happens to be an invariant of all circles. If you divide the area of a circle by the square of its diameter you get another invariant (pi/4). The class of these invariants is more likely to be interesting than the number pi itself.

Edit, and no, I do not particularly like pi. 

Holy Cow !!

This is true for a large class of numbers, to which pi may or may not belong.

On to the comprehension BS: First off, comprehending that infinite sequences of integers i, with 0<= i < 10 can encode any finite piece of data in this universe is trivial. Next, comprehending a number is matter of comprehending the system in which it lies; here it is the order and field properties of the real numbers. Its digits are useful in deducing what is less than pi and what is greater than pi, but patterns in digits are useless for comprehending real numbers.

The 'official', analytical definition of pi - which is without having to deal with things like circles which would need many postulates - is half the smallest period of the cosine function. Which is itself defined by the complex exponential, which is itself defined by a differential equation on the complex plane, which is itself...

People of Indiana are ridiculous, because they also had a bill in place that would give them more hours of daylight, by eliminating daylight savings time, which was badly needed because the crops were not getting enough sunlight.

And they turned it down! Unbelieveable!

Life would be so much simpler if they just let the legislature handle these silly math issues.

Calculations become so much easier when we just declare Pi to be 3.

Also, in my hometown, We declared a minimum wage of $8.00 an hour to free the workers from poverty, and a maximum wage of $6.00 an hour to combat inflation and money lust. Things turned out just fine, though oddly, the local city park is now very crowded during regular working hours. Hard to understand just why.

I know I am a day late, but:

Bad_Astronomy:Pi_Day,_a_picture_of_the_earth's_hemisphere_to_celebrate_math_nerd_day.html

Edit: This article is pretty neat, too.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/01/15/how-far-away-is-the-horizon#.UUPqTRyG2So

3.14159265358979    easiest digits to remember

Pi is for high schoolers. For college students there are e and gamma (Euler's constant).

Question: After pi, e, and gamma, which is the next constant that is seemingly transcendental, fundamental (meaning not a function of the other three), and yet still arises naturally (mostly meaning geometrically and not by infinite series or statistics) ?