What Is Pi: Discovering Pi

Someone had to discover everything we know about math and science. For example, someone had to discover pi. Someone had to find the ratio between the circumference and the diameter. Many people had to discover digits of pi. It is quite literally impossible to know pi. All those websites telling you millions of digits are a lie, I mean how could they be correct? To understand this first we’ll need to understand what pi is.

Pi is an irrational number. That means it goes on forever randomly. By randomly I mean the numbers aren’t in a pattern and they won’t repeat. There might be small repetitions, but they won’t repeat indefinitely.

Obviously pi is an irrational number that is the number of times the diameter of a circle goes around the perimeter. To break that down the length across the circle on a line of symmetry (where you could fold it in half perfectly) is a little more than one-third of the circumference (the length around the circle.)

For example, try this at home. There are a few ways to start this project, it may seem simple to draw a circle but be careful. You could trace around something but that might be risky. You could use a compass (the math one or the non-math one for tracing) or a protractor. Once you have completed that step takes a piece of string and make it the length of the diameter (across the circle, intersecting the midpoint.) Then take that string and wrap it around the circle. It should take a little more than three times for the string to get around the perimeter of the circle. This is because as you know pi is 3.14…. That is the relation between diameter to the circumference.

Now that we know what pi is we can inspect the prospect of someone discovering pi. While researching this, I discovered the history is a lot more complicated than expected. This ground-breaking discovery was found by multiple civilizations long before sharing information between civilizations was easy. But none were quite right.

The first culture to recognize pi at least in writing was the Egyptians. In 1650 B.C they defined pi in a fraction (16/9)2 or for comparison that is approximately 3.1605 or .0190... off. Then debatably came Babylon with 25/8 or .0165... off. Then Shulba sutras, the Hebrew Bible, Archimedes (from Greek history), and Ptolemy (the guy from the Rosetta stone) that’s just in the B.C’s. Archimedes was even correct to the 99th percentile.

So, the next question is how, how does someone discover something that doesn’t physically exist? The earliest way was to have two squares. One was outside the circle someone was trying to measure and the perimeter is 4. The other square is on its corner like a rhombus but a perfect square and the perimeter is 2.8, so the earliest decision was that pi is directly in the middle 3.4. Soon people started doing the same thing with other shapes that were more curved and our guesses improved significantly. Soon some developed a formula to continually improve it. To learn more about the formula I suggest the article Prehistoric Calculus: Discovering Pi by better explained it is extremely in-depth and well explained. The equation basically functions so the sides will multiply and if you use that equation 524,288 times you have a 100% accurate number.

But is there an 100% accurate number for pi? This is where I disagree with the essay I previously mentioned. Pi goes on forever, and we can’t understand or calculate infinity. For reference read my previous article What Is Infinity: Imagine Infinity. If it goes on forever how can we know all the digits of pi? Humans don’t have the mental capacity to calculate or withhold an infinite amount of digits. Pi isn’t perfect. No website can perfectly calculate a million digits of pi no matter what they may claim. We aren’t perfect either. Our mental capacity certainly isn’t, otherwise we would be able to store an infinite amount of digits. Although that theoretically isn’t possible, at all. Not even cats are perfect so maybe we are pretty similar to pi, after all we went through all that trouble to discover it.

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