Why Pi?

Posted by jns on 23 September 2007

As a little gloss to the previous entry on calculating , I’m finally reading the entertaining and enlightening article “The Quest for Pi” and find this unique observation after asking why people persist in calculating π to billions of digits:

Certainly there is no need for computing π to millions or billions of digits in practical scientific or engineering work. A value of to 40 digits would be more than enough to compute the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton.

[David H. Bailey, Jonathan M. Borwein, Peter B. Borwein, and Simon Plouffe, "The Quest for Pi", Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 19, no. 1 (Jan. 1997), pp. 50–57; reprint available online.]