Pi Facts, page 2
en syu ritsu
(the circle ratio)
Architectural Pi
There is a circular gallery in the Palais de la Decouverte in Paris that is dedicated to pi. In 1937, its cupola was decorated with the William Shank's (in)famous 707 digits of pi. Of course, ten years later, the builders discovered (along with the rest of the world) that only 527 of them were correct.
From Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Breakfast of Champions
- And now I drew a symbol whose meaning Dwayne had known for a few years in school,
a meaning which had since eluded him. The symbol would have looked like the end of
a table in a prison dining hall to Wayne. It represented the ratio of the circumference
of a circle to its diameter. This ratio could also be expressed as a number, and
even as Dwayne and Wayne and Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and all the rest of
us went about our business, Earthling scientists were monotonously radioing that
number into outer space. The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they
were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed
up this symbol of their secret lives:"
And, as he had been inserting stupid little drawings throughout the entire novel, he drew a representation of the capital letter Pi.
From an article in The New Yorker Magazine by Steve Martin
- Recent discoveries in the legal profession have left scientists, many of whom still linger in the Newtonian world, scrambling to catch up in the field of New Causality. In a case last month, a judge in Sacramento ruled in favor of changing the value of pi, thus acquitting a tire manufacturer of making tires that were not fully round. An appeal by scientists was thrown out for lack of evidence when the small courtroom could not physically accommodate a fully expressed representation of pi. The oblong tires in question were produced at the retrial, the judge said they looked round to him, the defense played the race card, and the value of pi was changed to 2.9.
Pi and Atmospheric Pressure
- Jonathan Bradshaw points out that standard atmospheric pressure is defined to
be
P= 0.101325 MPa (This is a human-defined value, which is approximately the average pressure at sea level.) Curiously, if you take the square root of this number and then divide 1 by the result (the reciprocal of the value), you get 3.14153.
