But the thing that grinds my gears more than anything is that love of pi doesn't go hand in hand with truth about pi. People want to get some good "I-am-a-nerd" feeling without taking the time to actually learn anything about the subject they claim to be nerding out about.
Nowhere is this more seen than the many memes that wanna be nerds spread about pi.
Myth #1 That Pi is a "Natural Number"
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| If you don't see anything wrong with this, you credibility as a math nerd is suspect. |
I have been seeing memes like this a lot lately and just want to smack the people who make them.
Sure you could argue that this is using the colloquial definition of natural and not the mathematical one, but it would be about as appropriate to do so as using the colloquial definition of theory in the midst of a discussion of the validity of evolution.
In mathematics the natural numbers are those used for counting.
Myth #2 That Pi Contains Everything Imaginable
This is the meme that made me hate IFLS. I spent a very long time trying explain to people there why this is a complete falsehood, but since IFLS (and the Internet in general really) are less interested in what is true and more interested in making science something that a person can geek-out over, I was shouted down.
More that anything this falsehood is based on a misunderstandings of what it means for something to be infinite, and what it means for a number to be irrational (i.e. an infinite non-repeating decimal).
Rather than try to explain to you why infinity means "continues without end" and not "contains every conceivable possibility" (I am not going to attempt this because I have learned that some people really don't want to give up their misconceptions about infinity, but if you want more information about this I highly recommend the youtube channel Numberphile while is run by the math department at the university of Cambridge) I am going to invent an irrational number right now that clearly does not contain everything in the universe.
Even though a human brain can easily see a pattern in the number above (that there is one more zero between each successive 1), the pattern is non-repeating and therefore the number is irrational.
But if you translated this into ascii (as directed by the meme) you would only generate 4 possible ascii characters, and as it turns out, none of them are even letters. How are you going to write the name of every person I have ever loved using just spaces, tabs and line carriages?
Myth #3 That Pi is an Inherent Property of the Universe
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| If you don't see anything wrong with this, you definitely aren't a math nerd. |
This is the meme that made me hate IFLS. I spent a very long time trying explain to people there why this is a complete falsehood, but since IFLS (and the Internet in general really) are less interested in what is true and more interested in making science something that a person can geek-out over, I was shouted down.
More that anything this falsehood is based on a misunderstandings of what it means for something to be infinite, and what it means for a number to be irrational (i.e. an infinite non-repeating decimal).
Rather than try to explain to you why infinity means "continues without end" and not "contains every conceivable possibility" (I am not going to attempt this because I have learned that some people really don't want to give up their misconceptions about infinity, but if you want more information about this I highly recommend the youtube channel Numberphile while is run by the math department at the university of Cambridge) I am going to invent an irrational number right now that clearly does not contain everything in the universe.
0.101 001 000 100 001 000 001 000 000 100...
Even though a human brain can easily see a pattern in the number above (that there is one more zero between each successive 1), the pattern is non-repeating and therefore the number is irrational.
But if you translated this into ascii (as directed by the meme) you would only generate 4 possible ascii characters, and as it turns out, none of them are even letters. How are you going to write the name of every person I have ever loved using just spaces, tabs and line carriages?
Myth #3 That Pi is an Inherent Property of the Universe
Pi is a number. All numbers, and in fact all mathematics, is merely a descriptive language. Math is as much a part of the universe as English is.
But moreover, pi describes something that doesn't even exist in the real universe - a perfect circle. Pi is the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle. Even in the days that pi was been calculated by hand people had determined it to hundreds of decimal places. Today the world record holder in memorizing pi once recited it to 67,890 places. The world record for calculating pi by a super computer is to over 10 trillion places.
How many decimal places do you think it would take to calculate the circumference of the largest possible circle (ie the circumference of the universe) as expressed in the smallest possible unit of distance (the planck)? The answer is less than 60.
The universe has literally no use for anything more than 60 decimal places of pi. Anything beyond that is an invention of humans. It is an invention that I love, and it pains me that people wish to pervert it.
But moreover, pi describes something that doesn't even exist in the real universe - a perfect circle. Pi is the relationship between the diameter and circumference of a circle. Even in the days that pi was been calculated by hand people had determined it to hundreds of decimal places. Today the world record holder in memorizing pi once recited it to 67,890 places. The world record for calculating pi by a super computer is to over 10 trillion places.
How many decimal places do you think it would take to calculate the circumference of the largest possible circle (ie the circumference of the universe) as expressed in the smallest possible unit of distance (the planck)? The answer is less than 60.
The universe has literally no use for anything more than 60 decimal places of pi. Anything beyond that is an invention of humans. It is an invention that I love, and it pains me that people wish to pervert it.
To me, the loveliest idea in Carl Sagan's novel "Contact" was the diagram of a circle encoded into the digits of pi. It's possible that idea inspired the above meme, but if so, they miss an important but subtle point: it would be a very strange and improbable thing to find such a pattern, full of significance. If every imaginable sequence existed in pi, it would mean nothing to find it there.
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