Pi (π)

50 Amazing Facts About Pi (π) | Amazing Facts 4U

1. Pi (π) is the most recognized mathematical constant in the world. It is the most important and intriguing number in all of mathematics.
2. The number Pi  (π)  is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. It can’t be expressed as a fraction, being an irrational number.
3. Amazingly when written as a decimal it never repeats and never ends and the sequence is random.
4. Pi is also referred to as the “circular constant,” “Archimedes’ constant,” or “Ludolph’s number.”
5. Pi has been studied by the human race for almost 4,000 years.
6. By 2000 B.C., Babylonians established the constant circle ratio as 3 1/8 or 3.125. The ancient Egyptians arrived at a slightly different value of 3 1/7 or 3.143.
7. One of the earliest known records of pi was written by an Egyptian named Ahmes ( 1650 B.C.) on what is now known as the Rhind Papyrus. He was off by less than 1%. It was the first attempt to calculate pi by building a square inside the circle.
8. Ancient mathematicians tried to compute pi by inscribing polygons with more and more sides that would more closely approach the area of a circle. Archimedes used a 96 sided polygon. Chinese mathematician Liu Hui inscribed a 3,072-sided polygon to calculate pi to 3.14159. Tsu Ch’ung and his son inscribed polygons with as many as 24,576 sides to calculate pi.
9. The closest fractions to the approximate value of Pi in increasing accuracy are 22/7, 355/113 & 104348/33215. The last fraction is accurate to 0.00000001056%.
10. Ancient Egyptians knew the value of Pi. The vertical height of the Great Pyramid of Giza times 3.14 equals the perimeter of the base.
11. Plato (427-348 B.C.) supposedly obtained for his day a fairly accurate value for pi: √2 + √3 = 3.146
12. Pi was also rigorously calculated by one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world, Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 B.C.) who met his death due to his fascination with Pi. He was too engrossed in his work to notice that Roman soldiers had taken the Greek city of Syracuse. When a Roman soldier approached him, he yelled in Greek “Do not touch my circles!”. The Roman soldier simply cut off his head.
13. The amazing fact is that the value of “pi” was first calculated by the Indian Mathematician Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century, which was long before the European mathematicians.
14. Sir Isaac Newton calculated pi to at least 16 decimal places.
15. Ludolph van Ceulen (1540-1610) spent most of his life calculating the first 36 digits of pi (which were named the Ludolphine Number). These numbers were engraved on his now lost tombstone.
16. Austrian astronomer Christoph Greenberger arrived at 38 digits in 1630 which remains the most accurate approximation manually achieved using polygonal algorithms.
17. In 1706 William Jones (1675-1749) first gave the Greek letter (π),  its current mathematical definition. Incidentally, Pi is the 16th letter in the Greek alphabet.
18. The amazing fact is that mathematician William Shanks spent 15 years calculating the value of pi to 707 places but unfortunately he made a mistake on the 528th digit writing a 5 instead of a 4. This discovery was made 60 years after his death. This mistake made the next 179 digits wrong!
19. Amazingly the mirror image of 3.14 is “PIE.”
20. Pi day is celebrated on March 14 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (March 14 is 3/14) at 1:59 PST which is 3.14159.
21. Pi Day is also Albert Einstein’s birthday. He was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm Wurttemberg, Germany.
22. Amazingly Pi occurs in hundreds of equations in many sciences including those describing the DNA double helix, a rainbow, ripples spreading from were a raindrop fell into the water, general relativity, geometry problems, waves, etc.
23. An amazing way to remember the value of Pi (3.1415926) by counting letters in the words of the sentence ” May I have a large container of coffee ?”.
24. Another sentence to remember Pi, “How I wish I could calculate Pi ?” (3.141592).
25. College mnemonics:  “How I like a drink, alcoholic of course, After the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!”  14 decimals of pi are represented in this quote: 3.14159265358979.
26. In 1961, fellow mathematicians Daniel Shanks and John Wrench became famous for breaking the 100,000th decimal of on an IBM 7090 at the IBM Data Processing Center in New York.  They used an equation found by Stormer in 1896.
27. It is amazing to note that the first decimal place of Pi is a 1 and also that the one-millionth decimal place of Pi is also a 1!
28. The amazing fact is that the 763-768 Digits of pi are 999999. This is known as the Feynman Point.
29. The most amazing fact to be noticed is that in the first 7,000 digits, the sequence 333 is found 3 times, the sequence 555 is found 5 times & the sequence 666 is found 6 times!
30. Amazingly if you take the 3rd, 6th, and 9th digits, they are, respectively, 1, 2, and 3. It is even more interesting to note that if you take the 100th, 200th, and 300th digits, they are respectively, 9, 6, and 3.
31. Amazingly the sum of the first 20 decimal places, 3.14159265358979323846 (not including the 3) totals 100.
32. The first 144 digits of pi add up to 666 and 144 = (6+6) x (6+6).
33. The sum of the first 358 decimals of Pi adds up exactly to 1,600. It is amazing to note that 3 + 5 + 8 = 16!
34. Since there are 360 degrees in a circle and pi is intimately connected with the circle, it is most amazing to discover that the number 360 is at the 359th digit position of pi.
35. The first zero appears at the 32nd decimal place i.e. 3.14159265358979323846264338327950
36. There are no occurrences of the sequence 123456 in the first million digits of pi.
37. Amazingly the sequence 12345678 occurs at position 186557266. This string occurs only once in the first 200 million digits of Pi.
38. Amazingly the sequence 0123456789 first appears beginning at the 17,387,594,880th decimal place.
39. The sequence 314159 reappears at the 176,451st decimal place of Pi.  In fact, this sequence actually appears further seven times within the string of the first 10 million decimals of Pi. Extending further the sequence 31415926 appears at the 50,366,472nd decimal place of Pi.
40. The following number was found to be prime by Robert Baillie and Marvin Wunderlich at the University of Illinois in 1979. The amazing fact is that the numbers, apparently, are all in the proper order to spell out the first 37 decimals of Pi. Number is 31,415,926,535,897,932,384,626,433,832,795,028,841. It is read as 31-undecillion, 415-decillion, 926-nonillion, 535-octillion, 897-septillion, 932-sextillion, 384-quintillion, 626-quadrillion, 433-trillion, 832-billion, 795-million, 28 thousand, 841.
41. The amazing fact is that there is a book giving the calculation of pi to two million places running to 800 pages.
42. If the circumference of the earth were calculated using π rounded to only the ninth decimal place, an error of no more than one-quarter of an inch in 25,000 miles would result.
43. You need to know only 20 decimal places to calculate the circumference of the Earth to a millimeter.
44. The amazing fact is you need only 39 decimal places of Pi to estimate the circumference of the universe within the radius of one proton!
45. Pi has been calculated up to 12.1 Trillion Digits by Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo on  December 28, 2013, using the Chudnovsky formula. It took 94 days for the computer. They had previously calculated Pi up to 10 Trillion digits 2 years back which had taken them 371 days.
46. Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old retired Japanese engineer set the current world record (100,000 digits) in 16 hours on October 3, 2006, in Kisarazu, east of Tokyo. His previous world record (83,431), was performed on July 1, 2005. His mnemonic system assigns symbols to numbers allowing for the memorization of Pi as a collection of stories.
47. π is the symbol Sandra Bullock clicks on to gain access to unauthorized databases on the Web in the movie “The Net.”
48. Amazingly a mysterious 2008 crop circle in Britain shows a coded image representing the first 10 digits of pi.
49. The amazing fact is that a few authors have used the digits of π to establish a new form of constrained writing, where the word lengths are required to represent the digits of π in sequence. The Cadaeic Cadenza contains the first 3835 digits of π in this manner and the full-length book Not a Wake contains 10,000 words, each representing one digit of π.
50. The amazing fact is that there is a website titled “The Pi-Search Page” at http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery.html  which searches & finds any sequence of digits in Pi up to 200 million places. You may check whether your birth date figures in the list.

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