Posts tagged pi
How Much Pi Do You Need?
NASA scientists keep the space station operational with only 15 or 16 significant digits of pi, and the fundamental constants of the universe only require 32. Yet in 2006 Akira Haraguchi of Japan recited 100,000 digits of pi from memory in 16 ½ hours, stopping for five minutes every hour to replenish his strength with onigiri rice balls. And [...]
Big Numbers Are Big
Image: xkcd
So if you’re worried that human creativity is worthless because every possible piece of literature, the MP3 of every song anyone will ever sing, the choreography of every ballet, along with the DNA of every person who will ever perform it, is encoded in pi, don’t despair. No one with any sense will be switching to a pi-mining stra [...]
Your Life in Pi
At Slate, I wrote about a pi meme that’s been going around for a few months, most recently shared by George Takei’s facebook page.
We don’t know for sure that pi contains all possible strings of decimal digits, but on a deeper level, the meme is right. And if it gets you pondering the mysteries of infinity, so much the bett [...]
I’m Not Celebrating Pi Day This...
My non-celebration of Pi Day, a roundup of Pi Day blog posts from around the Internet.
Read the full post at Roots of Unity.
Recent Comments