Pi Facts
Here are some fun pi factoids, poems, stories, pictures, and trivia. Have a great pi fact or story? Send it to us!
The record has been broken (again)!
In September, 1999, Dr. Kanada of the University of Tokyo calculated 206,158,430,000 decimal digits of pi (approx.3*2^36). In September 2002, he and his team broke their own world record, calculating 1.2411 trillion digits (over six times more than before). Click here for another news report.
Cartoon displayed by permission of John Grimes.
Move one matchstick to make the equation approximately true.
One man's definition of pi (from Godling's Glossary, by Dave Krieger):
Pi.
1.The Greek letter P or p, corresponding to the roman p.
2.A number, represented by said letter, expressing the ratio of the circumference
of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of pi has been calculated to many
millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or
spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not
smooth. Nature
herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when
they get sufficiently small, as Prof. Heisenberg has pointed out. However, the continued
extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise
be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.
