“World records: they’re not useful by themselves, but they set a benchmark and they teach us about what we can achieve and they motivate others. Given that even calculating pi to 1,000 digits is practical overkill, why bother going to 62.8tn decimal places?ĭe Gier compares the feat to the athletes at the Olympic Games. 62.8tn digit accuracy – what’s the point?
Mathematicians have estimated that an approximation of pi to 39 digits is sufficient for most cosmological calculations – accurate enough to calculate the circumference of the observable universe to within the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. “I can’t imagine any real-life physical application where you would need any more than 15 decimal places,” he says. “When you’re playing an MP3 file or watching Blu-ray media, it’s using Fourier transforms all the time to compress the data.”įourier analysis is also used in medical imaging technology, and to break down the components of sunlight into spectral lines, de Gier says.īut, says Harvey, there’s a big difference between calculating pi to 10 decimal places and approximating it to 62.8tn digits. Pi is also crucial to something in mathematics called Fourier transforms, says Harvey. The constant appears in Euler’s identity, e iπ + 1 = 0, which has been described as “ the single most beautiful equation in history” (and has also featured in a Simpsons episode). “You can’t escape it,” says David Harvey, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales.įor example, the solution to the Basel problem – the sum of the reciprocals of square numbers (1/1 2 + 1/2 2 + 1/3 2 and so on) – is π 2/6. “Knowing pi to some approximation is incredibly important because it appears everywhere, from the general relativity of Einstein to corrections in your GPS to all sorts of engineering problems involving electronics,” de Gier says. Jan de Gier, a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Melbourne, says being able to approximate pi with some precision is important because the mathematical constant has many different practical applications.
What is it good for? Absolutely everything The bill, whose purpose claimed to be a method to square a circle – a mathematical impossibility – almost enshrined in law that π = 3.2. In 1897, the Indiana Pi Bill in the US almost did away with fussy strings of decimals altogether. The amateur mathematician William Shanks, for example, calculated pi by hand to 707 figures in 1873 and died believing so, but decades later it was discovered he’d made a mistake at the 528th decimal place. It is a transcendental, irrational number: one with an infinite number of decimal places, and one that can’t be expressed as a fraction of two whole numbers.įrom ancient Babylonian times, humans have been trying to approximate the constant that begins 3.14159, with varying degrees of success.
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