![]() Several other movies reference pi, including the 1966 Alfred Hitchcock film Torn Curtain, the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller The Net, 1998 indie thriller Pi.įinally, pi is perhaps most rampant in pop culture on March 14-Pi Day! On Pi Day, nerds, geeks, and mildly interested geometry students alike come together and wear pi-themed clothing, read pi-themed books, and watch pi-themed movies, all while eating pi-themed pie.Ishango bone | Source: Counting, the very basis of mathematics dates back to 20,000 BC.Both MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have cheers that include “3.14159.”.Givenchy’s PI cologne for men is advertised as a scent that “embodies the confidence of genius.”.In an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Spock commands an evil computer to compute pi to the last digit-which it cannot do, of course, because, as Spock explains, “the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution.”.The room has 707 digits of pi inscribed on its wall (though there is an error beginning at the 528th digit, thanks to William Shanks’ erroneous calculations). A circular room in the Palais de la Découverte science museum in Paris is called the pi room.The main character in the award-winning novel (and 2012 film) Life of Pi nicknames himself after the constant.Here are a few more places it’s popped up: Yep, whether you like it or not, pi is everywhere. 1415926535897932384…” In another scene, a sign at the Springfield graveyard says “Come for the funeral, stay for the π.” Albert the Intern contemplates pi. In one scene, two young girls at a school for the gifted play patty-cake and say “Cross my heart and hope to die, here’s the digits that make pi, 3. The Simpsons is also pretty into pi (and math references in general). Even completely non-cerebral shows, books, and movies can’t help but mention the popular constant.įor example, pi gets mentioned in a scene from Twilight, in which vampire-boy Robert Pattinson recites the square root of pi (and on-the-ball Kristin Stewart quickly shuts him down). Pi has a special place in popular culture, thanks to its prevalence in mathematical formulae and its mysterious nature. Pi in pop cultureīut wait-the obsession with pi isn’t just limited to mathematicians and scientists. So there you have it-Egyptians calculated pi using pyramids (or did they calculate pyramids using pi?), Archimedes busted out the 96-gon, Zhu Chongzhi one-upped him with a 12,288-gon (or is that 12,192-upped him?), Ferguson calculated 620 digits by hand, and Kondo used a supercomputer to nab the current world record of 10 trillion digits. Kondo used Alexander Yee’s y-cruncher program to calculate pi to 10 trillion digits, which is a record calculation for both supercomputers and home computers. Shigeru Kondo carried out the longest calculation of pi to date on October 19, 2011. Ferguson’s calculation of pi to 710 digits in 1947 with a desk calculator to Takahashi Kanada’s calculation of pi to 206,158,430,000 digits in 1999 with a Hitachi SR8000. Of course, then computers entered the picture and calculating pi knew no bounds-beginning with D. The approximate ratio for pi also appears in the Bible in 1 Kings 7:23: He accomplished this by finding the areas of two polygons: the polygon that was inscribed inside a circle, and the polygon in which a circle was circumscribed (see figure above, right).Ĭhinese mathematician Zhu Chongzhi (AD 429-500) used a similar method to approximate the value of pi, using a 12,288-sided polygon. The Babylonians estimated pi to be about 25/8 (3.125), while the Egyptians estimated it to be about 256/81 (roughly 3.16).Archimedes didn’t calculate the exact value of pi, but rather came up with a very close approximation-he used 96-sided polygons to come up with a value that fell between 3.1408 and 3.14285.The Ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BC) is largely considered to be the first to calculate an accurate estimation of the value of pi. The earliest textual evidence of pi dates back to 1900 BC both the Babylonians and the Egyptians had a rough idea of the value. (One cubit is about 18 inches, though it was measured by a person’s forearm length and thus varied from one person to another.) Egyptologists believe these proportions were chosen for symbolic reasons, but, of course, we can never be too sure. The Great Pyramid at Giza, which was built between 25 BC, has a perimeter of 1760 cubits and a height of 280 cubits, which gives it a ratio of 1760/280, or approximately 2 times pi. ![]()
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