Recording artist Kate Bush has written a song entitled “Pi” which includes some of π's digits in the lyrics. Likewise, Polish Nobelist (1996) Wislawa Szymborska also features its digits in her poem, “Pi,” which begins:
Showing posts with label diameter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label diameter. Show all posts
Monday, September 6, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Rhymes help to remember the digits of Pi
Calculated at the website, WolframAlpha, here are the first fifty-nine digits of the irrational number π (ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter):
π = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749...
Before computers became available to calculate π to lots of decimal places in an instant, people who did scientific calculations could keep the number easily available by memorizing some of the digits. The website fun-with-words offers several mnemonics for π , the most common type being a word-length mnemonic in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit. For example the sentence, "How I wish I could calculate pi," gives us the first seven digits.
π = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749...
Before computers became available to calculate π to lots of decimal places in an instant, people who did scientific calculations could keep the number easily available by memorizing some of the digits. The website fun-with-words offers several mnemonics for π , the most common type being a word-length mnemonic in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit. For example the sentence, "How I wish I could calculate pi," gives us the first seven digits.
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