Pi is Wrong! (1 Viewer)

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icycloud

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A very interesting article for all :).

http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.html

Quote from the article: "What really worries me is that the first thing we broadcast to the cosmos to demonstrate our 'intelligence' is 3.14... I am a bit concerned about what the lifeforms who receive it will do after they stop laughing..."

Enjoy the article! :D
 

jarro_2783

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how very interesting. I only have one problem with that, what about the infinite series for sinx and the other trig series?
They would have to be divided by two to get the correct answer.
eg. Say you put sqrt(3)/2 into the formula, you would get pi/3 and the formula looks neat enough as it is. But adding another two in there could make it worse, and the answer would become pi/6.
Apart from that his theory sounds quite good.
 

Ataturk

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the title is very misleading.

yet the article has a very valid point.

where would i find articles such as this?
 
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icycloud

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Erdles said:
the title is very misleading.

yet the article has a very valid point.

where would i find articles such as this?
The title of the article is purposely meant to be misleading so people would read it :D. And you would find such articles in Mathematics magazines or journals.
 

Riviet

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Hmm, the article did evoke some thought in me. Nice arguement made in the article. :rolleyes:
 

YBK

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nice!

i only learnt radians yesterday... already, i dislike them... maybe it's cause i haven't practised using them yet :D
 

Dumsum

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Yeah it's a good point but I don't think anything will change. There's been a lot of things like this--such as conventional current flowing from positive to negative. When it was discovered that electrons flow the other way, they still didn't change anything.
 

KeypadSDM

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They didn't change it, because everything still worked the same.

Just because it isn't elegant, doesn't mean it's wrong. I mean how else do engineers to analysis, by brute force methods.

Plus the 2 just "goes" with the pi, Fourier transforms, man I couldn't do it without root-to-pi.
 

xiao1985

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^agreed...

the fact that conventional current was thought to go from positive to negative terminal in an electric circuit is way more inelegant than pi... but yet, we still use it...
 

me121

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i just had to revive this old thread.

it is indeed very interesting. because it makes sense to define pi as 1 revolution rather than half a revolution.

but as mentioned, its mealy convention and doesn't change the maths.
 

conics2008

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Forbidden. said:
omg conics is everywhere around the maths subforums except in general maths!
i found conics quite interesting at uni. :)
yeap i havn't been on here for ages.. looks like im just trying to put my marks all over this joint.
 

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