![]() ![]() Try making up your own mnemonic for the digits of pi. You work out the numbers by counting the letters in each word. Here are some of the decimal places that have been found: $$\pi = 3.14159 \ 26535 \ 89793 \ 23846 \ 26433 \ 83279 \ 50288 \ 41972 \ \dots$$ To help remember these digits, people like to make up sentences or rhymes, called mnemonics.įor example, "May I have a large container of coffee?" is quite a famous one for the first eight digits. The current record is about $51$ billion decimal places. In 1983 a Japanese team found $16\ 777\ 216$ decimal places for pi. In 1967 in France $500\ 000$ digits were found. In 1949 a computer was used to calculate pi to $2\ 037$ places. During the last few centuries people have been trying to find as many decimal places as possible so they can look for patterns in the Over the centuries, many mathematicians, such as Ptolemy (the ancient Greek astronomer), Tsu Ch'ung-Chi (of China) and Ludolph van Ceulen (of Germany) kept trying to find more accurate values for pi using a variety of different methods. In decimals this would be $3.14085 \ldots$ and $3.142857 \ldots$ (remember the decimal places keep going on and on). He decided that $\pi$ was somewhere between $310/71$ and $310/70$. This calculates to $3.16049 \ldots$.Īrchimedes worked on the problem of finding $\pi$ by calculating the area of regular polygons, with up to $96$ sides. In the ancient Rhind papyrus, the Egyptian scribe Ahmes said that $\pi$ was equal to $16/9$ squared. The Babylonians, in about 2000 BC, use $3$ or $3 1/8$. In the Old Testament of the Bible (I Kings 7:23) it is suggested that $\pi$ is equal to $3$. $\pi$ is needed to find the area of a circle using the formula $\pi$, the area would be approximately $3.14 \times 5 \times 5 \times 78.5$ square centimetres. ![]() Time and they have kept trying to find ways to calculate approximations of pi that are more and more accurate. This has fascinated mathematicians for a very long The strange thing is that on a calculator the answer you get can only ever be approximate - that is, you can't show an exact value for pi with digits on a calculator screen or even on large pieces of paper. This means that you can work out $\pi$ by dividing the distance around a circle by the length of its diameter. $\pi$ is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. ![]()
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