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 Mathematics
is the alphabet with which God wrote the universe - Galileo Galillei |
| Pi
is one of those things that fascinate people. So if you don't know what
it is, it's the figure you get when you take the circumference of circle
(distance around the circle) and divide it by the diameter (distance across
the circle).
Very roughly speaking, 3.14 But the thing about pi is that it keeps going on for ever and ever and ever. It's decimal places keep increasing. For ever. So if you wanted to be very philisophical about it, you could say that pi is a door into infinity. People
have done everything to pi, but the two most popular things to do with
it are in order;
1. Use a computer to calculate pi out as far as possible with the available time and equipment. 2. Try and memorise it as far as possible.In 1984 a new idea came when writer Carl Sagan published his book Contact (now a major film). It's a story about what happens when Earth starts to receive a signal from Vega ( a star 10 light years away). The scientists at a facility manage to decode it using various algothorims, and find that the prime numbers are being transmitted, just going up the list of primes when they start at 2 again. I'll just skip a bit here (and if you read it you'll realise that I'm skipping most of the book) to the end. A scientist using a hint from an alien uses some supercomputers to go deep down inside pi. At around 16 million decimal places they come across a huge long length of zeros and ones. A binary message. Basically the message is translated into saying that there are more messages deeper inside. And if you think about it, because it's infinite, all possible number sequences are in pi. Even a binary translation of the entire Internet. Which is so big that a googleplex (which for those of you who don' know, is absolutely huge) looks small in comparision. It's kind of scary to think about. Even an encoded version of a biography of your life is in there. |
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Copyright 1999 Nathan Adams |