Today I watched a bit of "The Life of Pi" - a great movie.
It prompted me to consider the magical number Pi, a non-repeating decimal value that is a major part of mathematics.
Many years ago I memorised it to 16 decimal places - 3.1415926535897932..... etc etc etc.
I got to thinking how strange it was that it is the essential component of the formula for calculating the circumference of a circle in relation to the radius (2 Pi r), and how it also features in the formula for calculating the area of a circle (Pi r^2).
The circumference is a liner dimension, and the area is obviously an area dimension, and these 2 values are completely separate entities. Why is it so? How come this ratio that we call Pi is an integral part of each of these separate computations?
No comments:
Post a Comment