-
Essay / Pi Theory - 847
Introduction: Pi is an incredibly essential number in our world, without it, countless things that have become necessary in our daily lives would be missing. We would not have the knowledge we currently have about celestial trajectories in our solar system and beyond. For ordinary people, pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, but this number is much more than that. It is an irrational and transcendental number which has aroused the interest of mathematicians. It is not possible to say precisely who first became aware of this number. There are writings dating back 35,000 years ago that reveal knowledge of a concept closely related to pi. According to Beckmann in his book A History of Pi, to understand how, in 2000 BC, the concept of pi and its meaning came more or less clearly to the human mind, "we must go back to the Stone Age and the beyond, and into the realm of speculation. ยป (Beckmann, 1971). Pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter.1st point: Ancient HistoryAncient civilizations began to realize that in fact there was a fixed relationship between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. There are some indications that the architects of the pyramids knew the concept of pi, this is believed to be because the dimensions of these pyramids give us a value of twice pi. The Egyptians did not have the exact value but perhaps an approximate value of pi to 3. According to the "A Brief History of Pi" section of Exploratorium, there is a papyrus that describes the Egyptian attempt to calculate pi. This papyrus is known as the Rhind Papyrus (c. 1650 BC), which contains how the Egyptians used a formula to approximate a value of 3.1605 for pi. As Allen reports in his art...... middle of paper ... ... indicated and it was trained "on a continued fraction for the tanx function." (Constant, 2014). Later, in 1794, Pi squared was also shown to be irrational by the mathematician Legendre. It was not until 1882 that the German mathematician Ferdinand von Lindemann demonstrated that pi was transcendental. According to Wolfram MathWorld, a transcendental number is "a number that is not the root of any integer polynomial, meaning that it is not an algebraic number of any degree." Steve Mayer writes in his article "The Transcendence of Pi" that the proof that indicates that pi is transcendental is not known, although it is not difficult. More Formulas for Pi and the Rise of Computers By the 20th century, various mathematicians had come up with new ways of representing pi. One of India's greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, proved the following representation of pi