It’s Thursday, and time for another retro science video! This time around, a brief (three-minute) explanation of Pi, that mischievous, irrational number. The following video explains visually how to calculate pi, and thus where formulae like pi * r-squared come from. (I can still remember my geometry teacher making the corny joke for the thousandth time: “Pie aren’t square. It are round!”).
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all the info about pi i never wanted to know! but very informative
posted by brandon on 10-15-2009 at 3:34 pm
Cool! But the “pi has something to do with prime numbers” left me hanging!
posted by Ryan on 10-15-2009 at 5:01 pm
Technically Pi is not an irrational number.
posted by Jeff on 10-15-2009 at 5:03 pm
@Ryan – yeah, I thought that was pretty funny actually. Like you could tell the narrator didn’t really have time to actually deal with explaining prime numbers or irrational numbers. :)
Also, as he says, one of the best uses of a supercomputer is to calculate digits of pi. Heck yeah.
posted by Chris Higgins on 10-15-2009 at 5:03 pm
That was complicated for nothing. This surely would have screwed up my comprehension of pi if I would’ve seen this while I was in school!
posted by Ranger J on 10-15-2009 at 5:19 pm
Cool video! The first part of the video did something my teachers never bothered to do. But I have to say I’m disappointed this video is only 2:57. About 17 seconds too short…
posted by LhL on 10-15-2009 at 7:27 pm
@Jeff: Of course it is! It cannot be represented as a fraction where both the numerator and denominator are fractions. Just because there are formulas for finding it doesn’t mean it’s a rational number.
posted by Wilson on 10-15-2009 at 8:50 pm
Excuse me, where both the numerator and denominator are whole numbers. I misspoke.
posted by Wilson on 10-15-2009 at 8:50 pm
Great post! Our personal favorite is the Mathematical pi song on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJJJmQojcLM
posted by lynn on 10-16-2009 at 1:26 am