Mathematical History and Explanation of Pi
Mathematical History and Explanation of Pi
In mathematics pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The ratio for pi is about 3.14, but the strange thing about pi is that it goes on forever and it will never stop! No matter how hard you try, you will never reach the last number of pi. Pi is of great importance in the measurement of circles but also in more advanced mathematics in connection with such topics as continued fractions, logarithms of imaginary numbers, and periodic functions. Through out the ages of time many values have been discovered for pi, such as the early Greek value of approximately 3 and 1/7. In about the mid nineteenth century pi had been figured to 707 decimal places and by the mid twentieth century, an electronic computer had calculated pi to the 100,000 digits. It would have taken a human being working without any errors about eight hours a day on a desk calculator 30,000 years to make this an accurate calculation. It took the computer about eight and a half hours to do this! But today we have the technology to compute pi to the 100,000,000 digits!
But in 1770, a German mathematician named Jhoann Lambert had concluded pi is an irrational number and cannot be computed. Also in 1882 another mathematician had also concluded that pi is transcendental and cannot be the root of any algebraic equation with rational coefficients.
As I said in the beginning pi will never ever end and we can still calculate it but we will never get the actual numbers of pi. It is best just to use 3.14 when calculating, but the more numbers of pi you use the more accurate your answer will be.