So all that aside, it basically means no matter how good our technology gets, we'll never know all the digits of pi. Even if we leave a computer on, 24/7 calculating it for trillions of years.
Didn't seem to get posted in my last post but here's what I said:
Does it even matter what after say the 100th decimal place? At that point the following decimal places would have very little, I would even say insignificant, effect on our calculations.
__________________
Jeremy Han
Fourth Year
Honours Molecular Biology and Genetics
Didn't seem to get posted in my last post but here's what I said:
Does it even matter what after say the 100th decimal place? At that point the following decimal places would have very little, I would even say insignificant, effect on our calculations.
That's true unless your talking about atomic and subatomic levels where it would make a difference. Nanotechnology is going to be amazing...and to be honest scary because of the things we will be able to use it for.
Details... lol just kidding. That's pretty cool to know.
I remember when I went to Waterloo on a field trip in grade 11 that the professor taught us that proof. The one that involves pi = a / b. Of course at that time everything just flew off the top of my head XD
The details are actually very involved... They go over my head even now, unless I sit down and think about it carefully haha.
(Just take a quick glance, and you'll see what I mean :p)
Quote:
Originally Posted by jhan523
Didn't seem to get posted in my last post but here's what I said:
Does it even matter what after say the 100th decimal place? At that point the following decimal places would have very little, I would even say insignificant, effect on our calculations.
For all intents and purposes, TT has a finite length. This is because in physics, uncertainties take care of the tail end. Root 2, e all those funky irrational numbers are truncated after a sufficient point.
Besides, we don't know, we might live in a discrete universe (where there's no such thing as an 'irrational length.')
Sin of pi = 0 because sin(x) is defined as the 'height' of the right angle triangle with angle x:
Since a circle is 2TT radians, then that means sin(TT) is the 'upper half arc'...which means the 'triangle' is actually perfectly flat, and thus has a height of 0 (The same is true for sin(0), sin(2TT), sin(3TT), etc).
Since we're back to talking about Pi, lol, that reminds me of a documentary I saw a while back. The documentary was on this British guy who is alleged to be the smartest person ever. During the filming of the documentary, he did some pretty amazing things like learned all of Icelandic in a week to a point where even native speakers couldn't easily tell that he wasn't from there (he was also fluent in 9 other languages).
The best part though was that he could recite digits of Pi indefinitely (he was literally calculating the series representing it in his head superfast in real time I think ). As a test, they gave him a piece of paper with all the digits of Pi up to 20,000 digits, and changed a few here and there. When he encountered an incorrect digit, he said it made him feel sad, lol.
Look for it if you can; I think it was entitled "Brain Man".
__________________
Dillon Dixon
Third/Fourth year (brb, IBM for 16 months)
Software Engineering and Embedded Systems
Since we're back to talking about Pi, lol, that reminds me of a documentary I saw a while back. The documentary was on this British guy who is alleged to be the smartest person ever. During the filming of the documentary, he did some pretty amazing things like learned all of Icelandic in a week to a point where even native speakers couldn't easily tell that he wasn't from there (he was also fluent in 9 other languages).
The best part though was that he could recite digits of Pi indefinitely (he was literally calculating the series representing it in his head superfast in real time I think ). As a test, they gave him a piece of paper with all the digits of Pi up to 20,000 digits, and changed a few here and there. When he encountered an incorrect digit, he said it made him feel sad, lol.
Look for it if you can; I think it was entitled "Brain Man".
Interesting I should try and find that. Its amazing the gifts some people are born with. However, I'd also like to say the human mink is a remarkable thing on its own and hard work and determination will improve your mental abilities greatly.
^^I've seen that guy...He's Daniel Tammet, and classed as an autistic sauvant (albeit a very high functioning one), so I'm not quite sure if they can actually make the claim that he's the smartest man ever. For instance, Kim Peak (another autistic sauvant, who the character Rain Man was based off of) can read books 2 pages at a time (one eye on each page), and can recite every word of every book he's ever read.
But it's more remarkable than you gave him credit for: this guy actually visualizes numbers as shapes/colours etc (without meaning to), which is a form of synaesthesia. So he claims that he sees TT as this beautiful landscape with like, a waterfall, hills and a lake or something. Then when someone changed 1 digit (which was used as a test by doctors to see if he was b/s'ing them) of the first however large number of digits of TT, and he instantly was like "What did you DO?!" And he started describing the 'changes' in his landscape, like how someone destroyed the waterfall or something.
EDIT: I found the documentary...not sure if it's the exact one Dillon's refering to, but it's the one I saw a couple years back on the BBC. Definitely worth a watch if you have an hour to kill:
Wow, those videos are just incredible, no other way to describe it. Makes me feel like I haven't accomplished anything whatsoever =O XD
Haha ya those types of things make you feel like that. Its definitely incredible and I'll have to watch them later on oooh and look what time it is 3:14 hehe
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). As a test, they gave him a piece of paper with all the digits of Pi up to 20,000 digits, and changed a few here and there. When he encountered an incorrect digit, he said it made him feel sad, lol.
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