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By Definition

Pi is an irrational number that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It has been approximated by various ancient cultures but its value is infinite and non-repeating as decimals. The modern symbol π was first used in 1706 to represent pi and was chosen because the Greek letter resembles the first letter of "perimeter". Pi is commonly used to calculate the area of a circle and appears in other mathematical concepts like probability.

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80 views2 pages

By Definition

Pi is an irrational number that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It has been approximated by various ancient cultures but its value is infinite and non-repeating as decimals. The modern symbol π was first used in 1706 to represent pi and was chosen because the Greek letter resembles the first letter of "perimeter". Pi is commonly used to calculate the area of a circle and appears in other mathematical concepts like probability.

Uploaded by

misha 20
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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By definition, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

Pi is always the same number, no matter which circle you use to compute
it.
For the sake of usefulness people often need to approximate pi. For many
purposes you can use 3.14159, which is really pretty good, but if you want
a better approximation you can use a computer to get it. Here's pi to many
more digits: 3.14159265358979323846.
The area of a circle is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or "pi
r squared":
A = pi*r^2
A very brief history of pi

Pi is a very old number. We know that the Egyptians and the Babylonians
knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn't
know its value nearly as well as we do today. They had figured out that it
was a little bigger than 3; the Babylonians had an approximation of 3 1/8
(3.125), and the Egyptians had a somewhat worse approximation of
4*(8/9)^2 (about 3.160484), which is slightly less accurate and much
harder to work with. For more, see A History of Pi by Petr Beckman (Dorset
Press).

The modern symbol for pi [ ] was first used in our modern sense in 1706
by William Jones, who wrote:
There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of particular
Curve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitate the Practice; as for
instance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to (16/5 -
4/239) - 1/3(16/5^3 - 4/239^3) + ... = 3.14159... = (see A History of
Mathematical Notation by Florian Cajori).
Pi (rather than some other Greek letter like Alpha or Omega) was chosen
as the letter to represent the number 3.141592... because the letter [ ] in
Greek, pronounced like our letter 'p', stands for 'perimeter'.
About Pi
Pi is an infinite decimal. Unlike numbers such as 3, 9.876, and 4.5, which
have finitely many nonzero numbers to the right of the decimal place, pi
has infinitely many numbers to the right of the decimal point.
If you write pi down in decimal form, the numbers to the right of the 0
never repeat in a pattern. Some infinite decimals do have patterns - for
instance, the infinite decimal .3333333... has all 3's to the right of the
decimal point, and in the number .123456789123456789123456789... the
sequence 123456789 is repeated. However, although many
mathematicians have tried to find it, no repeating pattern for pi has been
discovered - in fact, in 1768 Johann Lambert proved that there cannot be
any such repeating pattern.
As a number that cannot be written as a repeating decimal or a finite
decimal (you can never get to the end of it) pi is irrational: it cannot be
written as a fraction (the ratio of two integers).
Pi shows up in some unexpected places like probability, and the 'famous
five' equation connecting the five most important numbers in
mathematics, 0, 1, e, pi, and i: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0.

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