Can’t Wrap Your Head Around Pi? Here’s a Cool Visual to Help
1 min read
Summary
Pi has been celebrated on 14 March since 1988 when Larry Shaw, an employee of NIST, organised the first Pi Day event to eat pie and explore the never-ending digits of pi.
Pi, denoted by the Greek letter π, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter and is commonly approximated by 3.14.
However, it is actually an irrational number, which means that it has no end when written as decimals.
As part of Pi Day this year, Alex Sutherland has written a Python program to test whether pi can be expressed as a fraction of two integers.
The program tests every possible fraction and so far, after millions of iterations, has not found any integer fraction that accurately represents pi.
This proves that pi is irrational and furthermore, the program’s inability to find an integer fraction for pi suggests that it is infinitely more complex than anything that can be represented by a fraction.
