It's exactly 11

I know all of the digits of pi. I have them memorized. What I'm not sure about is the order they go in.

10 trillion digits and we still can tell exactly what the area of a circle is.

Chemicals are our friends!

/she's a witch!

redpanda2: Chemicals are our friends!

/she's a witch!

I was told there would be no meth

"Just 39 digits are enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the observable universe with an error no larger than the radius of a hydrogen atom."

It makes me wonder that if the spatial dimensions had worked out slightly differently that Pi could be 3

Worst "epic pi quest" ever.

darkscout: "Just 39 digits are enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the observable universe with an error no larger than the radius of a hydrogen atom."

Shiat like this why I love math.

Obligatory "Pi is Wrong" (new window) comment.

stuhayes2010: 10 trillion digits and we still can tell exactly what the area of a circle is.

Sure we can. Just take the derivative of the surface area of a sphere of the same radius.

What is it, just 3.14159 was enough to get us to the moon and back?

39 digits to calculate the radius of the UNIVERSE to the accuracy of the width of a hydrogen atom?

Now we know it to 10 trillion digits?

Uff da...

/Just know the first 100...

Mad Canadian: Uff da...

It's basically a quest to see if Pi really does run for over or at some point starts repeating. At this point, it's pretty well settled, it runs on forever never repeating.

Why remember what you can look up.

/BTW, it's actually 3.0. There's a difference.
//duh

cjmook21: [www.relaxedpolitics.com image 640x421]

LOL. I know it to the 6. I don't know why. I don't work with math. Maybe it's because I've seen Darren Aronofsky's "Pi" about a bazillion times.

stuhayes2010: 10 trillion digits and we still can tell exactly what the area of a circle is.

error 303: Sure we can. Just take the derivative of the surface area of a sphere of the same radius.

I see what you did there.

Hey, this isn't about pointdextrose!

Just 32 digits are enough for a song...Link (new window)

For a circle with radius z, the area can be found with the following formula:

pi * z * z = A


/oblig

Fun.

For sense of scale, if you could say 4 digits a second, it would take you 79274 years to recite this.

/had a Pi themed wedding
//fark Tau

What an irrational article.

Computer, compute to the last digit the value of pi.

Paging thejoyofpi.

thejoyofpi, you are needed in the Geek tab.

Now how about doing some actual math and proving or disproving the Riemann hypothesis? Or doing the same with the continuum hypothesis? Hell someone proving the Goldbach conjecture would be pretty spiffy.

DrZiffle: Why remember what you can look up.

/BTW, it's actually 3.0. There's a difference.
//duh

Well, that's what the Bible says.

when showing your work you only need to carry it to the first 9 trillion.

/don't get the obsession over pie, unless its in the lemon meringue form

apeiron242: /had a Pi themed wedding
//fark Tau

Tau makes so much more sense though. But pi is already ingrained in most people to the point where using tau would just confuse a bunch of people.

Wellon Dowd: Indeed, calculating so many digits of pi serves no useful mathematical purposes - pi goes on forever, but just 39 digits are enough to calculate the circumference of subby's mom's stomach with an error no larger than the radius of a hydrogen atom.

FTFM

Great, we're going to have to reprint Chapter 4 of The Book.

Orgasmatron138: I know it to the 6. I don't know why.

My memory of pi's digits is based entirely on how many digits my old scientific calculator carried. Hit the pi key, and get 3.1415927 on the display, with the understanding that the 7 was a 6 rounded up.

Maybe you were just bored in a class, as I was.

Who uses that for a drunk test?

Or the quadratic equation.

malle-herbert: Just 32 digits are enough for a song...Link (new window)

I like this song more

Misplaced yat: Orgasmatron138: I know it to the 6. I don't know why.

My memory of pi's digits is based entirely on how many digits my old scientific calculator carried. Hit the pi key, and get 3.1415927 on the display, with the understanding that the 7 was a 6 rounded up.

Maybe you were just bored in a class, as I was.

I know it to the 5th decimal because a girl I knew in HS was fond of repeating MIT's cheers, "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159."

They are smart enough to create custom hardware and software for calculating Pi out farther than anyone else but not smart enough to invest in a UPS and a RAID?

pudding7: Every time I read a story like this, I think about the ending of the book Contact.

Me too!

That book was the reason I clicked on this link.

Going by this if you know it to 64 places that's enough to compute a circle as wide as the known universe to an accuracy smaller than the "pixelization" of reality, which is to say smaller than a Planck length. So more places than that is only useful if you want to see if you can break your computer or your air conditioning.

bravian: They are smart enough to create custom hardware and software for calculating Pi out farther than anyone else but not smart enough to invest in a UPS and a RAID?

Intelligence often does not equal common sense.

StoPPeRmobile: DrZiffle: Why remember what you can look up.

/BTW, it's actually 3.0. There's a difference.
//duh

Well, that's what the Bible says.

No, it doesn't. I'm no Bible-thumper (quite the opposite, in fact), but that charge needs to stop. What the Bible passage says is that the diameter of a ring-shaped object (the brim of a giant bowl big enough for a man to bathe in) with thickness was ten cubits "from brim to brim," and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about.

You also have to take into account the thickness of the bowl. There are two circles involved here (the inner and outer brims), not just one. The same Bible passage states that the thickness is "a handbreadth."

Given these units of measurement which were imprecise and based on body parts (a "cubit" is the distance from elbow to middle fingertip with hand and fingers extended parallel to forearm), "handbreadth" could refer to either "palm" (the width of the four fingers when held together − about a seventh of a cubit) or "span" (the distance from thumbtip to fingertip of a spread-out hand − about ½ cubit).

Now, granted, you and I would most logically measure the diameter of the inner circle and the circumference of the outer circle when writing what was written in that passage, but remember that the Hebrews / Israelites often did things considerably "backwards" from the way we would do them today (e.g. writing right-to-left, no vowels in the alphabet, a day beginning at sundown instead of midnight or sunrise, etc.), so maybe they would do this backwards as well, measuring the diameter of the outer brim and the circumference of the inner brim. With that, and assuming that "handbreadth" = "palm", the numbers given are actually what would be expected when rounding off to the nearest whole number (Hebrew numbers had no concept of fractions nor decimals).