Pie? Pi?
We all know what pie is, but what is pi ?
Ancient civilizations must have asked themselves the same question (though I don’t know whether they knew what pie was). They did figure out that that there was a fixed ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter of the circle that was approximately equal to three. That ratio is represented by the Greek letter pi (
), which was first used by William Jones in 1706 and later adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737.
), which was first used by William Jones in 1706 and later adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737.Today, Pi Day is celebrated by math lovers around the world on March 14th. Pi = 3.1415926535…. This number goes on and on and never repeats its digits in order or comes to an end. People have used computers to calculate its value to more than a trillion digits.
Is pi useful? Of course it is. Why would people make such a fuss about it unless it had practical applications. Pi is used in formulas to calculate information about circles, as we mentioned above, and other figures. Several formulas depend on pi to get a close approximation of the area of a circle and the volume of a cylinder. The formulas are:
Area of a circle = pr2 where r is the radius of the circle.
Volume of a cylinder = pr2
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