Sunday, March 14, 2010

Irrationality and transcendence

Happy Pi Day, which celebrates and promotes understanding of the number that represents the relationship between a circle's circumference and its diameter. If you take the circumference of any circle and divide it by its diameter, pi is the number you will get for an answer. The number is 3.14159, and so forth, out into infinity, without a pattern ever repeating itself.

The title of this blog post comes from the information in the Wikipedia entry for pi, that pi is a number that is both irrational and transcendent. Which somehow seems like an exceedingly lovely concept. Wikipedia also has an entry on the Pi Day celebration.

You can see pi calculated to one million digits by following this link.

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