pi, a la mode

There is some pretty exciting news today on the Yahoo! home page. It seems that some Japanese dude recited pi to 83,431 decimal places.

Most of you are probably saying right now, “Jimbo, why can’t you do something important like that instead of wasting your time blogging and spending eight hours a day at work?”

Of course, Jimbo’s first reaction was’ “Ummm, pie.”

That is, until he read the story and then realized that the story wasn’t about dessert at all. Pi, as we all know, is the number we use to calculate the circumference of a circle. The diameter of the circle times pi gives us the circumference. For most of us, pi, expressed as 3.14 is good enough. For example, if you have a circle 100 feet in diameter, the circumference is 314 feet. I used to work for a company that made water tanks and it was my job to calculate how many ¼” X 96” X 480” plates would be required to make a 100-foot diameter tank, so I’d know how many of them to buy. When I used 3.14 it was close enough that the guys who put the tanks together could make the ends meet. But I digress.

The guy in Japan who was able to remember the first 83,000 digits of pi probably has a good memory, but I wonder whether pi is one of those numbers that is necessary to commit to memory. I’m sure someone has it written down, somewhere. For most of the things we do every day, the first two digits after the decimal are good enough. If not, unless you are calculating the circumference of the universe the most you’d need would be one or two more digits. If you were calculating the circumference of a 100-foot circle, the 83,000th decimal place would not be measurable out on the ring.

Of course, I sure the guy is resting up today, having lunch with friends, discussing how some guy in the United States sits around and writes weblogs a few times a week instead of doing something important like reciting pi to infinity.

And one of his friends says something like, “Yeah, those Americans waste a lot of time. What a nerd.”

Only he says it in a language most of us can’t understand, except a couple of you loyal readers on the Pacific Rim.

Anyway, for a guy who sometimes starts giving his home phone number instead of his work number when asked and who has trouble remembering his pin number at the ATM, you can bet I’ll keep pi written down, rather than trying to remember it even to three places. And, I think we’re all better off not keeping it in our heads.

At least that’s the way we feel here in Jimbo’s world.