Colin McEnroe Show: Pi - A Window On Infinity
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Published: Mar 14, 2012
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Jeremy Teitelbaum
Photo:Chion Wolf
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Colin McEnroe Show: Pi - A Window On Infinity
It's Pi Day, and we have to ask, can numbers be sexy?
Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia is being revived on Broadway right now. I saw it Friday night. Much of the play is about a young math genius, a girl living 200 years ago, who writes in her notebook:
"I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through numbers alone."
She asks her tutor:
"God's truth, Septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? Do we believe nature is written in numbers?"
Well, numbers are written in nature, especially our friend Pi. As Richard Preston wrote in the New Yorker 20 years ago: Pi hides in the rainbow, and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water pi emerges in the spreading rings.
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E-mail from Dan
Does our inability to nail down pi mean there is no such thing as a perfect circle?
Does it show that the perfection is not to be found in the finite, only in the infinite?
E-mail from Bill
Any relationship between Pi and Uncertainty Principle i.e. structure of universe? Does it point to infinite universe?
E-mail from A Different Kevin
you mentioned the disk of the Sun as an example of pi's prominence in the natural world, but did you know that the Sun's mass bends space in such a way that its radius is greater than what it ought to be given its circumference?
In the case of black holes, for example, the radius is infinite.
Besides, there are no true circles in nature, are there?
E-mail From Jay
Prof. Michael Neumann, Chmn of the UConn math dept. gave a presentation to our group a few years ago about how the rabbis 1,500 years ago approximated "Pi." It's fascinating how they did it.
E-mail from Kevin
Moving from one mtg to the next. Surprised and a little embarrassed at how fascinating i find this. Thanks.
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