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The magic of Pi (pi)

Article  in  QJM: monthly journal of the Association of Physicians · March 2009

DOI: 10.1093/qjmed/hcp008 · Source: PubMed

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Q J Med 2009; 102:439–440
doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcp008 Advance Access publication 18 February 2009

Coda

The magic of Pi (p)

Pi can be taken as a symbol for one’s education. Incidentally this has been voted by some mathema-
The deeper one goes into it the more mysterious it ticians to be the most beautiful equation of their
becomes and the more ramifications one can find. whole subject.
You can go as far with pi as your abilities can take Why on earth should there be such a simple
you. Pi is first met in elementary geometry at school connection between pi and e? It has nothing to do
and it occurs in one of the first equations that with circles. Euler’s e like pi is an irrational number
you can solve; that is to find the circumference or (i.e. cannot be written in the form of a fraction a/b)
areas of circles. For pi you substitute the fraction and its value cannot be given exactly; to five
22/7 and the answer comes out right enough to decimal
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi places it is 2.71828. And why is the
satisfy the school master. In the sixth form when
1
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi involved? I have always felt uneasy about
doing finite and infinite series you learn that
1. Is it just a fudge factor to make it possible to
there does not appear to be an exact number for find the square roots of minus numbers? I know
pi. Although it is a simple ratio of the circumference exactly what the number p means
ffiffiffi in two books or
of a circle to its diameter, the decimal places three apples; and also the 4papples ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi means some-

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appear to go on forever. This is not too unfamiliar thing. But what does the
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1 apples mean?
because you have learnt that the decimal places for Physicists tell you
1 is a number reflecting
such fractions as 1/3 or 1/9 go on as 0.333. . . or ‘real’ life too; and it is a most useful quantity to study
0.111. . . recurring. But pi cannot even be expressed rotating vectors, alternating currents or analysis of
as a definite fraction. Now if you consider a number other wave forms.
line scaled from 0 to 5 Units you would imagine that Does pi come into medicine? We all use the
pi would occupy a definite position lying some- normal (or Gaussian) distribution to work out the
where between 3.1415 and 3.1416 and that it could student’s t-test for the probability values of our
be defined accurately. Taking the half-way point at observations. This bell-shaped curve approaches the
3.14155 might be it. No—so you go on taking horizontal axis without ever quite reaching it. Yet,
smaller and smaller intervals and using each time the total area under the curve can be accurately
the half-way point to be pi, accumulating more and determined by a method of advanced calculus
more decimal points but you never seem to arrive at involving double integrals (which is beyond me);
the exact number. In 1966, pi was calculated on an and it works out to involve the square root of pi. This
IBM 7030 computer to 500 000 decimal places. In Gaussian integral (or probability integral) of the
1994, the calculation was run out to a billion standard normal distribution can be expressed as:
decimal places; there were no recurring motifs and
leads one to believe that there is no finite number of
The area under the curve
digits for pi. The numbers on such a line appear to
be continuous and there are no gaps between them; Z1
so you can go on dividing ever smaller intervals to 2 pffiffiffi
f ðxÞ ¼ e
x dx ¼

infinity.

1
At university I was astonished to be shown the
relationship of pi to Euler’s
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi exponential e and the Such a strange way to come across pi again makes it
imaginary number (i),
1. The tutor produced it look quite scary. Does pi really have magical
like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a top hat: properties?
pffiffiffiffiffi Going to 2000 BC there is a clay tablet written in
e

1 ¼
1: cuneiform script that is on display at the current

! The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Physicians.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
 440 Coda

exhibition on Babylon in the British Museum. The (1642–1727) calculating pi was a chicken feed
tablet shows you how to calculate the areas of and in his Method of Fluxions he shows in four lines
squares, rectangles and circles and was probably how to get a value of pi to 16 decimal places. The
used as architectural exercises for students. The series he uses converges on pi much more quickly
tablet states that the perimeter of a regular hexagon than the first of these series for pi co-discovered
approximates to the circumference of a circum- by his rival Leibniz (1646–1716). Newton devotes
scribed circle; and that to calculate the area of the only a short paragraph to his series, apologizing for
circle you need to employ a ‘circle ratio’ (the symbol such triviality with a ‘by the way’. He later writes
pi was not used until the 18th century). The ‘circle that ‘I am ashamed to tell you to how many places
ratio’ came out as 31/8, a slight underestimation of I carried these computations’. His real business was
the true value. The Babylonians were perhaps to work on the big problems of the Universal Laws
hampered by using 60 as a base system for counting of Gravitation and the nature of light. The history of
rather than 10; which lingers on to this day with calculating pi comes somewhat to an end with Euler
60 min to the hour and 3608 to turn a full circle. (1701–83). He produced formulas for calculating pi
This idea of calculating pi by using polygons to by the dozens. To take just one example: the series
work out the circumference of a circle to any of inverse squares
desired degree of accuracy was taken up by
Archimedes (287–212 BC) of Syracuse. In his book 1=12 þ1=22 þ1=32 . . .
On the Measurements of Circles instead of just using
a hexagon to circumscribe the circle like the had baffled mathematicians for decades. No one
Babylonians, he used regular polygons of n sides had been able to find its sum until Euler showed it to
inscribed within a circle as smaller than the be p2/6. He went on to discover many more series
circumference, whereas the perimeter of a similar and expressions that summed to terms involving pi.
polygon circumscribed outside the circle is taken as Although Euler had finished off one chapter in the
history of pi he opened up a new one. What sort of

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greater than the circumference. By making n
sufficiently large, the two perimeters of the polygons number is pi? We know it is irrational, but is it
will approach the true circumference of the circle, transcendental as well? In other words, can pi be the
one from above, the other from below. Archimedes root of an algebraic equation of finite degree with
started with the hexagon and progressively doubled rational coefficients? It took another 100 years to
the number of sides to a polygon of 96 sides. The settle this question but the proof was not easy.
diameter of the circle was easy to measure; so he Lindemann’s proof of 1882 runs to 13 pages of
obtained a value for pi, expressed as an inequality: tough mathematics (not read by me) showing that pi
is indeed transcendental.
310 <
< 317: So in the end this little number of pi turns out to
71
be irrational, transcendental and its decimal places
As far as I understand Euclid (300 BC) con- may run to infinity. All big concepts for something
tributed nothing original to pi. His Elements system- we met and used unthinkingly in our early school
atize the mathematical knowledge available to him. days.
But he is not the father of geometry; he is more the
father of mathematical rigour and logical thinking. David Galton
The first four books of the Elements often turn up on
the school syllabus and Book 3 deals with the
properties of circles. All his theorems can be derived
Further reading
1. Beckman P. A History of Pi. New York, St. Martin’s Press,
from his five basic postulates or axioms but nothing
1971.
new is added to the ‘circle ratio’.
2. Courant R, Robbins H. What is Mathematics. London, OUP,
After the Greeks, pi took a rest for a while.
1963.
Fibonacci and Galileo worked on it half-heartedly.
3. Ogilvy CS. Excursions in Mathematics. New York, Dover
But gradually ways of calculating pi by using series Publications, 1984.
were discovered. For a giant like Newton

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