Value Of Pi essays

Value Of Pi essays And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other; it was round all about, and his height was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. This line from the bible demonstrates the ancient nature of the irrational number pi. From the excerpt from the bible it can be concluded that pi equals three. However, today with the advent of the computer many people have calculated pi to billions of digits. With pi calculated to so many digits, the value of three for pi today would be considered nonsense. This is not so. The value of three for pi makes sense in day-to-day life. Suppose you need to make a quick, rough estimate about the area of a circle you certainly cannot multiply a number with billions of digits in your head. For a quick estimate you can use the value of three for pi. Society in general accepts the value of pi to be 3.14. This is taught to us in that boring Geometry since we were in high school. These calculations work well when the problem is a simple textbook problem. However, using pi as 3.14 would cause serious complications when used to figure out complex calculations that require precision such as NASA experiments and fine detailed physics experiments. These calculations require pi to have at least twenty or more digits and are solved with the use of supercomputers, which are able to do over millions of calculations per second. Another way pi can be expressed is the idea of using the complete value of pi every time that the value was used, using the symbol and learning to think in terms other than numbers. This would make calculations very quick and would allow students to understand the concept of pi rather than just using a calculator to find an answer. In the end, you must choose a different value of pi for each situation in which it is used. For day-to-day, practical purposes, the value of three for pi could work. For understanding the concept of pi ...