Cutie Pi

The other evening Erika was struggling once again with math homework. As her frustration mounted, I asked if I might help, and what she was working on. She said, “It’s these darn little numbers.” I opined that little numbers are usually easier to work with than big numbers, to which she countered, “No Dad, there are tiny little numbers printed higher than the other numbers.” Aha. Exponents.

I love exponents! I can’t explain it but there has always been a warm place in my heart for them, and for onomatopoeia. As a teen I considered having a party celebrating these two things (The party could be called “To the pow-er”) but thought better of showing too much of my quirkiness at a young age. We went bowling instead.

Discussing mathematics with Erika is always fun. Besides learning about exponents, she made two memorable comments about pi. First, she said that she didn’t understand why “they” made that up. Why couldn’t they just have used a round number like 4 or 6? 3.14159 just seemed like a lot of needless work. I think Euclid turned over in his grave. I am no sage in geometry, but I tried to explain that no one “picked” the value of pi; it is just the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. “All circles?” she asked incredulously.

The second thing she said was that a kid in her class had the whole thing memorized. I highly doubt that because pi has been proven to be an irrational number (impossible to express as one integer over another integer) and last I heard, computers have carried out the calculation more than 200 billion places. (That’s 2 times 10¹¹ by the way.)

There is no way the kid could have memorized that many digits, or have recited them during 2^nd period. There are two ways to look at this. First, to say all 200 billion digits in a 50 minute stretch he’d have to say over 67 million digits each second. Call me a skeptic but that is probably impossible, even for a nerdy 7th grader trying to impress the chicks. Or, if you assume the kid was reciting at the blazing rate of three digits per second, 24 hours a day, he would have to have started before Christ was born to finish by the bell. If he did, hats off to him but I doubt it. (He would have to be freakishly old, hungry, tired and certainly would have very bad breath.) 200 billion is a big number.

Oh I love discussing math with "God's Gift to the Humanities and Creative Expression."