I heard an interview with Darren Aronofsky, the director of the Move Pi. (Not to be confused with Life of Pi). So I went and read the plot summary on Wikipedia HERE. That is fascinating of itself. Such imagination to created that set of circumstances and events. The themes of the film are religion, mysticism and the relationship of the universe to mathematics.
Coming up is the 25th anniversary of the movie. Darren Aronofsky gets back the rights to the movie - he put that in the contract at the time of his directorial debut. He said he is going to launch the refurbishment of the movie on Pi Day, March 14th. This gives new meaning to Scientific American calling Pi Day the celebration "Irrational exuberance".
And Pi? What about it? Pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed as a fraction. Pi is a transcendental number, a real number that is not algebraic, or in even more technical terms, a real number that cannot be a root of a polynomial equation with integer coefficients.
Where did Pi come from? The earliest known reference to Pi comes from ancient civilizations such as the Egyptians and the Babylonians (4,000 years ago). In ancient times, documents such as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus found the area of a circular shape in a curious, three-step manner. Here is the explanation of the experiment from Scientific American:
"Try a brief experiment: Using a compass, draw a circle. Take one piece of string and place it on top of the circle, exactly once around. Now straighten out the string; its length is called the circumference of the circle. Measure the circumference with a ruler. Next, measure the diameter of the circle, which is the length from any point on the circle straight through its center to another point on the opposite side. (The diameter is twice the radius, the length from any point on the circle to its center.) If you divide the circumference of the circle by the diameter, you will get approximately 3.14—no matter what size circle you drew! A larger circle will have a larger circumference and a larger radius, but the ratio will always be the same. If you could measure and divide perfectly, you would get 3.141592653589793238..., or pi."
And how many digits are there? More than six billion have been identified through computer computations.
Christmas themes at the Fantasy of Trees this year. |
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