Pi, an AMAZING description!!

reply to post by kthxbai

Since you can never set the legs (sides of the squares) to a definite number, you can never prove it's a perfect square that you are measuring the diagonal of that you profess to be one

Of course if the legs are equal you could "Pull the 3-4-5" on it. Wouldn't that prove it?

Originally posted by DenyObfuscation
reply to post by kthxbai

 

Since you can never set the legs (sides of the squares) to a definite number, you can never prove it's a perfect square that you are measuring the diagonal of that you profess to be one

Of course if the legs are equal you could "Pull the 3-4-5" on it. Wouldn't that prove it?

The square problem is that the ratio between the hypotenuse and the side of the square will always be irrational.

The is no problem making a perfect square.....it is just the ratio that will always be irrational.

At the end of the book, the computer tells her that when pi is expanded in base 11, some 100,000 digits in, the expansion suddenly breaks into 599 zeros, a 1, and then 597 zeros and three 1s, and proceeds in that fashion of 1s and 0s for 160,000 digits, and then returns to random digits.

They didn't have computers back when they found the original base 47 anomaly (according to Dali) yet they used that for the big science of the day.

Probably use this base 11 anomaly for some secret modern classified technology?

Originally posted by kthxbai


I guess you could think of it as a cross between "light", "analog" and "digital". Just as the parts, the individual digits, could be isolated in the "digital" sense, there's always a number after it in the "analog" sense. This is in the same manner that light exists or behaves as both a wave and a particle.
...

AH!! I see! It begins to make sense! Thank you :-)

Originally posted by Starcrossd
Saw the episode and loved the description also, it made things slightly clearer to me. S&F

I also detest math and need help grasping basic concepts of it. Can anyone explain (for a complete math/physics ignoramus like myself) ..How do numbers translate to tangible things? (ie; 'it's in everything') and intagible also, like, sounds, music, colors etc? I'm probably not asking the question right but hopefully someone can interpret what I mean (but don't know what/how to ask-lol) Thx!

When I finally got Maths was when 1) I started looking at math as a language - a language of relationship between two or more 'THINGS' and 2) I started looking into 'Fractals' and how everything is built up from repeating (iterating) equations - often quite simple. Then my head blew apart - LOL

Math isn't in everything so much as it IS everything and describes everything.

reply to post by InfinitePerspective


A bit misleading though, as you can only find the answers to all the great questions in the universe in pi when you already know them to begin with. That text could imply otherwise if not read carefully and understood correctly.

reply to post by kthxbai


i,ve used pi most of my adult life and never heard of this,very nice video.well done.

reply to post by Xtraeme



Just to add, pi can be represented by the sum of fractions of integer numbers (in an infinite series though). So there are at least some pattern that represent pi.

Originally posted by OccamAssassin

Originally posted by Starcrossd
Saw the episode and loved the description also, it made things slightly clearer to me. S&F

I also detest math and need help grasping basic concepts of it. Can anyone explain (for a complete math/physics ignoramus like myself) ..How do numbers translate to tangible things? (ie; 'it's in everything') and intagible also, like, sounds, music, colors etc? I'm probably not asking the question right but hopefully someone can interpret what I mean (but don't know what/how to ask-lol) Thx!

The irrational number is like infinity. As it cannot repeat its pattern - logically - it must be constantly changing.

Because it is constantly changing, it stands to reason that every possible combination of numbers will contained within an irrational number. So - despite not being able to tell where a particular number will be - the irrational number can be said to contain infinite information though that information(with our current understanding) is essentially useless due to its random nature.

edit on 5/1/2013 by OccamAssassin because: (no reason given)

Reason has not much to do with reality when the reasoning is faulty. It's possible to have non-repeating sequences of digits with one or more of the digits always missing. So the claim that just because it's non-repeating it contains all possible numbers is false. In fact, there is a very simple case: express Pi in binary, which uses just 0 and 1. It is exactly the same as the decimal number which uses only 0 and 1. It will clearly not be able to contain all other possible numbers because it is lacking 2 through 9 and yet is still non-repeating.

I'm not at all sure the claim about Pi is correct. I'd need to see a proof to show that Pi also includes all other irrational numbers, which are non-expressible (infinite in length), and irrational number are more numerous than the counting numbers. I do know there was some effort by someone in the past to determine the distribution of the digits in Pi, but I don't know the result.

reply to post by DenyObfuscation


Here is a lik to a site which has Pi to the first 50,000 digits:
50K of Pi

Here is my favorite conversion of Pi to music:

reply to post by BayesLike

Reason has not much to do with reality when the reasoning is faulty. It's possible to have non-repeating sequences of digits with one or more of the digits always missing. So the claim that just because it's non-repeating it contains all possible numbers is false. In fact, there is a very simple case: express Pi in binary, which uses just 0 and 1. It is exactly the same as the decimal number which uses only 0 and 1. It will clearly not be able to contain all other possible numbers because it is lacking 2 through 9 and yet is still non-repeating.

Ahh...Pi in binary is still 3.141........

Changing the base does not change the numbers......just how they are represented.

reply to post by BayesLike


Infinity is contained within infinity.

Yes, it will give you a headache

Originally posted by DenyObfuscation
reply to post by kthxbai

 

Since you can never set the legs (sides of the squares) to a definite number, you can never prove it's a perfect square that you are measuring the diagonal of that you profess to be one

Of course if the legs are equal you could "Pull the 3-4-5" on it. Wouldn't that prove it?

Pi does, for the first 10^12 digits seem to be essentially uniformly distributed. Check out this site:
Wolfram Distribution of Pi

This however is from calculating Pi and counting the frequency of the digits. That's a long way from proving that Pi can contain all other numbers! The only way it can be shown is a proof -- and I'm beginning to believe that proof does not exist. It's not my area of math, so I don't know. But I'm pretty sure if it had been shown, efforts to determine the distribution would not continue.

reply to post by OccamAssassin


The illustration of the binary was to show that possibly random, non-repeating numbers did not imply that all other possible numbers are covered. The claim that Pi contains all other numbers cannot be based on that property.

And yes, infinity is contained in infinity -- no problem with that for aleph0. Since a list of digits is in 1 to 1 correspondence with places, it would appear at first to be impossible to contain more than a subset of the irrational numbers because each can only be expressed by convergence in a list. Otherwise the number would not be irrational. Irrational numbers are in aleph1.... Which is a "bigger" infinity than the infinity in aleph0.

Pi expressed as digits in a list of course converges to Pi. Starting in other places in the list causes convergence to other irrational numbers -- so some other irrational numbers are in fact converged to within Pi. But it's not clear that all irrational numbers can be convereged to this way because there are only aleph0 possible starting places and aleph1 numbers to represent. I think the claim about Pi may be false for irrational numbers because there is at least one too many for a list (the classical proof for irrational numbers) but the claim may be an open question for rational numbers.

But again, this has not been one of my areas of study.

Freaking math I hate numbers lol that aside this was a really cool thread and I understood about .00001% of what was posted throughout this thread. More power to the number people!!

S&F for you!!

Originally posted by Aleister
Mind expanding video, but is it true? Math experts, please tell us.

Of course its true, don't need to be a math expert to know that. If its a random string of numbers that goes on for infinity, at some point there will be meaningfull stuff.

But still, its just a random string of numbers you can't actually use if for much... At least for finding out your life story, that is.

Just for reference, a very related theorem is this one:

en.wikipedia.org...

That clip is amazing, because it really does get at the thrill of math: Its the interconnectedness of everything, the way patterns repeat throughout the universe.

That said, I think the statement is actually wrong. Its true that any infinite truly random sequence of numbers should contain at some point any other sequence of numbers somewhere in it. However pi fails at a key test of randomness: It can be compressed into a finite form. For instance, the computer program which enumerates all the digits of pi is finite in length. But for a truly random string of infinite numbers, there would be no computer program that could enumerate them. That's because the computer program works through a pattern, but truly random numbers have no pattern. The amount of numbers that can have their digits enumerated with a computer program is "countable", but the amount that can't is "uncountable".

en.wikipedia.org...

Another way to see why its wrong is through information theory. It takes a certain amount of bytes on your drive to store a photo, a song, a movie, and they can only be compressed, or zipfiled, down so much. But if every song, every movie, every picture is encoded in the digits of pi, and the program to enumerate pi is only a few kilobytes....well, who needs big hard drives anymore. It just doesn't make sense to me. I mean I may be wrong, but I don't see it.

Originally posted by Aleister
reply to post by kthxbai

 

Mind expanding video, but is it true? Math experts, please tell us.

Star and flag and more stars and flags, given to you under the table.

Yes.

It is true because nobody knows the circumference of a circle or the diameter of the circle. Ratios are more precise. Measurements are approximations.

The writers of the Bible knew the speed of light, the measurements of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon as ratios. They left proof in the verses in case you doubted them.

reply to post by Starcrossd

.How do numbers translate to tangible things?

Did they answer your question?

Math becomes necessary when you need to measure things. The more complex the world we build around us the more complex the math required to lay it out. But really its just counting. And how do you count color or sound? Or spirit? You might not be "smarter" than all the people that tried to answer your question, but you might be wiser.

How many trees in the forest or stars in the sky? What is their diameter and height? Or area?

Pi is one of those numbers that finds the area of a circle that doesn't really exist anywhere in the real world. It is a flat circle. Good for laying out sprinkler heads. How accurate you want or need to be depends on how big the lawn is.

When they say the number goes on forever and contains all other numbers, it has nothing to do with your birthday or phone number, just wowing those mathematically inclined enough to wonder about useless stuff like that.

I never had to use it to figure out anything except the answes on the tests that required it.

Figure the value of Pi to 5 decimal places. I hated fractions. If you divide one by three you get .33333333---.

I say you get a third.

Flame on.