This week a couple of guys finished a bit of maths and felt pleased with themselves because they had produced a result that was nearly twice the size of the previous effort. They calculated Pi to five trillion places. (What dream dinner dates...) To put that number in perspective, that’s 17 times the estimated number of stars in our galaxy. Or, nearly 50 times the number of people who have ever lived. It’s a big number. It’s 5, with 12 noughts after it.
Pi is a transcendental number, which to mathematicians means that it’s not a root of a non-constant polynomial equation with rational co-efficients. It also has other properties. I'll sum up the highlights for you.
Against all the odds, nowhere does the sequence 8675309 appear.
Your address appears in it 180 times. As predicted by Nostril Damus.
At the 4 trillionth number, it counts down from 999 and then lifts its head up from the tree and yells “coming ready or not”.
After the 4, 382, 904, 663, 821st number, there’s a small dog. He just sits there.
You can do all the calculations you need with 3.14.
The other 4, 999, 999, 999, 998 are a bit overkill.
Apparently, a large part of π was decided by an infinite number of monkeys tapping away on 22/7 casio scientific calculators.
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