Pi is one of the most mysterious numbers in the world. You know, that famous irrational number that starts with 3.14 and goes on forever. It is so famous that the 14th day of the 3rd month is celebrated as "Pi Day" in many parts of the world. Happy pi day By the way… what makes this number so worthy of celebration? Is it because It's also Albert Einstein's birthday? Where does this number appear outside of math lessons at school? Everywhere... I can show you the pi number even with the needle you see in my hand...
The relationship between our physical world and mathematics is not merely just a day on the calendar. First, let's remember where this ratio comes from. This number is the ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter. Whichever circle in the world you look at and whichever you measure does not change at all. They do most certainly have this ratio.
This is a number very close to 3. But not 3. So you can't consider pi as 3 🙂 Even people 4000 years ago didn't consider pi as 3. At least they knew one digit after 3 very well. The Egyptians could not have built the pyramids had they not known.
Those looking for what comes after the comma next to the 3, from Archimedes to today, were able to find its hundreds of digits correctly. The record for these manual calculations was broken in 1946. They found exactly 620 digits after the comma. The point we've reached 7-8 thousand years after we started using circles and wheels is not bad at all. But in the last 70-80 years, with the invention of computers, we can say that we have blown this number off 🙂 Last summer, a record was broken. A computer in Switzerland worked 108 days to calculate 62.8 trillion digits of the pi after the comma!
One big step for man but a small step for a number that is infinite!
So, do you need to calculate that many digits? After all, even people with the best memory have been able to memorize up to 70,000 digits so far. No, normally this is not necessary. People that do memorize, do this as a hobby or as a mental exercise. For computers, it is considered as an indicator of their computational power.
Knowing the first 152 digits of the pi number is more than enough to do your job anywhere in the universe, let alone on Earth... How? Imagine a large sphere. If you know the diameter of this large sphere, you can find its circumference using the value Pi, right? Now make the diameter of this sphere you imagined 93 billion light years. Yes, that's the diameter of the observable universe: 93 billion light years. If we calculate the circumference of such a sphere with only the first 152 digits of pi, will we get the exact result? No. For one thing, we don't even know if the universe is spherical or not. But our margin of error would be less than the Planck length. The Planck length is theoretically the smallest distance in the universe. It is so small that there is no instrument that can measure it. So knowing the 152 digits is practically useless. Using only the first 40 digits of pi, we can calculate the circumference of the universe with less accuracy than the thickness of a hydrogen atom. We need a maximum of 15 digits of Pi to calculate the circumference of the largest sphere that we will create by assuming the distance from us to the Voyager spacecraft, which humans have ever made and sent the furthest from Earth, as a radius. That's why even NASA doesn't bother with the trillions of digits of pi in its calculations. But still I'm giving the link of the first 100000 steps here in case there is a need: barisozcan.com....
As a result, If you are to ask how many digits of the pi you should memorize, which would be redundant too, you just need to know the first 13 digits of Pi using the Pi-philology method. I gave you a tip about how to do it at the beginning of the video. And at the end of the video we will go over it again, so don't worry.