I'm not a mathematician, but I found this little paper surprisingly interesting and readable. Bob Palais says in it "I know its blasphemy to some, but I believe Pi is wrong".

LINK TO PAPER

Is Pi a Lie ? and should mathematicians come clean?

That guy just wants to call pi 2pi. That would be just comparing the circumference to the radius instead of the diameter. You can't have your pi and eat it 2.

He makes a fair point I suppose. But he is just arguing over nomenclature as Youndan says.

Besides, the vector magnitude of the periodic circle function repeats twice over the 2pi period, so it's not that difficult to remember.

youngdan wrote:

You can't have your pi and eat it 2.

hmmm! 2 Pi or not 2 Pi.

P.ie is wrong.

Slightly off topic but was anyone else's maths teacher a complete nutcase? Its quite common, I always wonder why.

Both mine and my girlfriend's were. It is indeed very common. We loved ours though, she used to show us pictures of her dog.

I loved maths too. I miss it...

One night a friend and I were bored so we downloaded a .bat file to calculate pi to very large numbers of decimal places, then wrote in a script to find mobile phone numbers in it and rang the numbers to inform people that their numbers appeared in pi.

I wonder would not everyone's phone number appear in Pi sooner or later? I will await your call.

I wonder, would it? Could such a question ever be answered?

We also calculated 1/0 to be -7. Interesting.

shutuplaura wrote:

Slightly off topic but was anyone else's maths teacher a complete nutcase? Its quite common, I always wonder why.

I read recently that many mathematicians and scientists are borderline aspergers.

evercloserunion wrote:

I wonder, would it? Could such a question ever be answered?

We also calculated 1/0 to be -7. Interesting.

OK. That makes me wonder what your value for Pi was. Did it start with 0.87?

Wait now, which makes you wonder. The phone number thing or the -7 thing? The -7 thing had nothing to do with pi, it's just another few hours we wasted with what little maths we acquired in leaving cert with interesting and humorous results.

Of course the value of pi was the usual 3.1415926535... but we calculated it to many millions of digits and set a script to search for 10-digit strings starting with "085", "086" or "087".

evercloserunion wrote:

Both mine and my girlfriend's were. It is indeed very common. We loved ours though, she used to show us pictures of her dog.

I loved maths too. I miss it...

One night a friend and I were bored so we downloaded a .bat file to calculate pi to very large numbers of decimal places, then wrote in a script to find mobile phone numbers in it and rang the numbers to inform people that their numbers appeared in pi.

In my maths classroom we had pi to 100,000 decimal places or something on the wall... it was just a wall entirely covered in paper with size 12 font .

evercloserunion wrote:

Wait now, which makes you wonder. The phone number thing or the -7 thing? The -7 thing had nothing to do with pi, it's just another few hours we wasted with what little maths we acquired in leaving cert with interesting and humorous results.

Of course the value of pi was the usual 3.1415926535... but we calculated it to many millions of digits and set a script to search for 10-digit strings starting with "085", "086" or "087".

I was only slagging. But if you think 1/0 is -7 then I was curious as to what value you'd use for Pi. (Not that I'm claiming to know what 1/0 is, but I'm fairly sure it's not -7).

Indeed. In fact we used the McLauren series, just for the laugh when we were bored. We found a series for 1/(x^3) and then let x=0. Completely nonsensical of course but it was just for a laugh. Of course using different degrees like x and x^2 produced different values, usually irrational numbers between -2 and -3, but as this cancelled down perfectly to -7 we thought it more interesting.

Kate clears it up nicely:

I'm almost a minute in and it's just a picture of pi with weird music, is it 9.30 mins of this?

evercloserunion wrote:

Both mine and my girlfriend's were. It is indeed very common. We loved ours though, she used to show us pictures of her dog.

I loved maths too. I miss it...

One night a friend and I were bored so we downloaded a .bat file to calculate pi to very large numbers of decimal places, then wrote in a script to find mobile phone numbers in it and rang the numbers to inform people that their numbers appeared in pi.

Yeah maths really attracts them! It was by far my weakest subject in school. I once went out with a girl who got a first in her maths course in Uni. She could'nt explain differentiation to me so the 'Fla never had a chance.

what does the 'Fla mean?

The 'Fla was the craziest man i ever met. He was my maths teacher in school and trying to get me interested in maths must have been like beating his head against a wall.

evercloserunion wrote:

I'm almost a minute in and it's just a picture of pi with weird music, is it 9.30 mins of this?

It's Kate Bush singing pi to eighty something decimal places. See if you can learn the lyrics!