Pi

No, not that, you dirty minded son of a b.

"What is this fascination with the number pi? Over the centuries men have striven to calculate it to more and more decimal places. In the days of pencil and paper the record stood at something like 700 places, but since the advent of computers it's all gone silly, and the latest claim is by a Frenchman who says he has calculated it to 2.7 trillion places - and he only stopped there because that was as much as his hard disks could store. But why would he - or anyone else - bother? After all, it has been said by those who know much more about this than I that knowing pi to just 46 decimal places would be sufficient to calculate the distance round the known Universe to within the size of a single hydrogen atom. It seems that these days the attraction has less to do with pi itself, and more with writing better and better computer programs to perform the calculation."

Thank you, http://rndman.blogspot.com/.

1 comment:

Pablo Carpintero said...

By the way, did you know there even is a pi day ? Neither did I.

See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day.

The world indeed is coming apart !