## 10 March 2012

### Pi

Warning: Math geeks will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.

When I was in grade school, I was introduced by my father to the value of pi. I only knew 3.14, then. In high school, our math teacher said we should be using 3.1416 for evaluation/solving pi problems. In college, our cruel professor said 3.14159 should be used instead. And just now, before I knew it, I was doing a research on the longest/largest value of pi that we have determined so far. A quick check at Wikipedia will give you the following:

In 1989, the Chudnovsky brothers correctly computed pi to over a 1 billion decimal places on the supercomputer IBM 3090 using the following variation of Ramanujan's infinite series of pi:
$\frac{1}{\pi} = 12 \sum^\infty_{k=0} \frac{(-1)^k (6k)! (13591409 + 545140134k)}{(3k)!(k!)^3 640320^{3k + 3/2}}.$
In 1999, Yasumasa Kanada and his team at the University of Tokyo correctly computed pi to over 200 billion decimal places on the supercomputer HITACHI SR8000/MPP (128 nodes) using another variation of Ramanujan's infinite series of pi. In October 2005 they claimed to have calculated it to 1.24 trillion places.

My reaction was... WHO CARES.

Kidding. Actually, I do (and many other people as well, I'm sure). I am actually interested how human knowledge can [accurately] paint a model of infinity through numbers -- the so-called universal language.

I have this tattoo design containing a few hundred digits of pi. I'm just trying to complete some projects before I can schedule a tattoo session with a former schoolmate. Anyone interested to join me?

(And the truth is, I am looking for a foam mattress with as many digits of pi printed on it. Sarap matulog na kayakap mo ang pi. :-)