The Mystery of Pi
I must start with the admission that math and I never got along in school However, as I experienced life I realized how unavoidable and important it is and my inadequate knowledge about fundamentals. This explains why I was interested in reading in a book about astrophysics a discussion of Pi as new knowledge for me. As every school child knows, but which had escaped me, it represents the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet. As you all know, It refers to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, which is 3.141592653, commonly rounded to 3.14. But, it turns out it isn’t that simple. When first calculated over 1600 years B.C. it has since been studied, re-calculated and discussed over the centuries since. With calculators the calculation went from 32 decimal places in the 1950’s to the calculation of a mainframe computer that produced 51 billion digits. In spite of all the study, pondering and computer applications, it turns out the exact value of pi can’t really be calculated anyway.