Tuesday 10 August 2010

Pi, A little more than 3.14



This one is for my student, Joe Sullivan, who memorized Pi farther than any student I ever taught... See you in a few weeks, kiddo.

Japanese and US computer scientists claim to have calculated Pi to five trillion decimal places... If you had all the others memorized, you can go back to work now....
See more at Shecky's Math Frolic.

1 comment:

Joshua Zucker said...

Dan Asimov made a great joke about this.

Person 1: Wow, five trillion decimal places. Is that enough for me to calculate the circumference of my wading pool? It's about five feet across.

Dan: It depends on how accurate you want to be. Since you've already introduced substantial error with the rough estimate of the diameter, you wouldn't want to make matters worse by using only five trillion decimal places.