3.14159265

May 3, 2006 Alun Life, Science 1 Comment 3.14159265, Music

If you’ve ever wanted to mem­or­ise the first nine digits of pi then you’re in luck. Inky­cir­cus points to a video by Hard ‘n’ Phirm extolling the joys of pi. There’s even a rap bit which tells you how to mem­or­ise them back­wards if you live in Que­bec.

When ink and pen in hands of men inscribe your form biped­ally,
They draw an altar on which God has slaughtered all sta­bil­ity.
No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint,
And yet to see you all at once we only need the point.
Flirt­ing with infin­ity, your geo­met­ric pro­geny,
That fit inside you oh so tight,
With tri­angles that feel so right.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459

Your ever-constant homily says flaw is dis­cip­line.
The pat­ron saint of imper­fec­tion frees us from our sin,
And if our tran­scend­ental lift shall find a final floor,
Then Man will know the death of God where won­der was before.

…and then because there’s a rap that’s where the pi-related swear­ing starts.

It’s poetry. You can tell it’s poetry because it rhymes which is nine-tenths of poetry as far as I’m con­cerned. When I finally get round to read­ing Stephen Fry’s Ode Less Trav­elled I might have a more intel­li­gent opin­ion on poetry, but for now I’ll stick with my stu­pid one. The song closes with over 170 digits of pi, so if you mem­or­ise the lyr­ics you’ll have all the pi you need.

The Wiki­pe­dia entry on Piphilo­logy has this nice poem:

Sir, I send a rhyme excel­ling,
in sac­red truth and rigid spelling,
numer­ical sprites elu­cid­ate,
for me the lexicon’s dull weight.

which encodes the first twenty-one digits. But that’s no help if you want to mem­or­ise pi backwards.

Because pi is an irra­tional num­ber you can find any finite sequence of num­bers in it if you look hard enough. You can (prob­ably) find your birth­day in the first 200 mil­lion digits of pi.

The thing that bothered me in school is that pi is the ratio of a circle’s cir­cum­fer­ence to its dia­meter. So how do you cal­cu­late pi accur­ately? You simply can­not meas­ure a circle accur­ately enough (if you could find a per­fect circle). If the Earth’s orbit were per­fectly cir­cu­lar and you could meas­ure it to mil­li­metre accur­acy you still wouldn’t reach twenty decimal places. So where do you get 200 mil­lion from? Math­world gives you vari­ous ways to cal­cu­late it.