Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Wonder of Pie


<< Those crazy mathematicians and their japes...


Sorry, I meant pi - the number, not the tasty pastry-based snack. I have discovered, through years of careful research (plotting co-ordinates, calculating logarithms, reading facts about pi) this frankly mind-bending fact:


The ratio between the total length of a river and the distance from source to mouth as the crow flies is 1:pi.


In layman's terms (ok, in slightly less complicated terms), this means that the total length of a river is usually just over 3 times longer than the distance from source to mouth, so mathematicians have suggested that it is in fact pi. It's certainly not universally accurate, but that's not gonna stop me telling everyone I know.

Pi has never been calculated entirely - a recent effort by a Japanese computer scientist got an accuracy of 1.24 trillion digits, which frankly just isn't good enough. Yesterday was pi day, so to celebrate, and in no way to pad out this entry, here's pi, accurate to 50 digits:

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510.

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