Survey posted 2000-03-15 16:54 by Andy.

Contribute ideas to surveys by sending a mail to survey@ticalc.org.

The Pi Calculator I made is now available from www.ticalc.org (89/Basic/Math programs).

My prog's FAST!!!
only 4 secs to calculate the first 50 digits
only 15 secs for the first 100

Please download it and let me know what you think of it...

A Kid from an my school district won an annual pi recitation with 5,005 places.
Last year he had 1,001 places memorized

That's a lot

If you know pi to 40 places you can calculate the circumferance of a circle that curcumsribes the obseravable universe to within the width of a proton.

Hmm....
I think a lot of us are lying about pi. Someone needs to ask the people saying they know so many places and double check it, i doubt so many people know so many digets. How many digets did A. Einstein know?? Now, sure, a few of us might know umpteen decimal places, but, after a while, your brain will atrophy unless you use that info every day and soon you will know 3.14 like the rest of us. I only know 3.14 for 2 reasons:
I dont work a whole lot with circles in my life.
For TAAS(the big texas test to graduate)You use 3.14 or get the problem wrong, which is not good for you.
And hey, i could lie to my friends and say "Yeah, i know a lot of pi. 3.1445974983104790 81646598450923465435832658 234598432658945984 4329856249836593245!"<--Totally made up(watch it be right)And they would go"OOH,AAH" being the ignorant fools they are. So, although it may win contests and make us look like math kings, why waste time and fill up your unlimited brain space with such things.

Because, hey: 12 digets on a calc is enough for me!
But hey you never know: that might be on tonights Who Wants To Be A Millonaire!
--R

digets?
hehe

It really looks like many are lying about the number of digits they know for pi. The % of lairs? Well as of this writting 4.8% claim to know 51-100 places. Based on the skew maybe so. But after 100-250 at 2% the percentage goes up to 5.7% for over 251+ places. I don't think so. Maybe this survey is more of a test to show the percentage of lairs! I know its 100% at never telling a lie. Pi, 3.1415926535989... as I remember it...hmm. Anyway checking my TI-86 I got ...5989 wrong: it sould be ...5898. Dyslexia?

Yeah, i seriously doubt many people can rememer over 150 digits, if even that.

However, In middle school, I had a classmate with a true photographic memroy. He could recite hundreds of digits of both pi and e. We even checked it, and he had only about 1 in 25 digits wrong. He could also recite almost the entire star wars tilogy, dune (almost) and the first two star trek movies.

I'm sure he was popular with the girls :-P

two things:

first

Albert Einstien probably didn't spend a lot of time memorizing pi (he was busy with the photo-electric theory, quantum mechanics, relativity, etc.)

and second

the brain CAN NOT atrophy, it will retain everything inputed into it. Only the recall system can deteriorate.

I know that pi in terms of arctangents is equal to 16*arctan(1/5) - 4*arctan(1/239)

While that is indeed an interesting calc for pi using trig. 4*arctan 1 is easer to remember.

Wow! I thought people would not know much more than 3.14! Usually I just use the pie button.

You know, I think most of these people who just say that they know 150 some odd digits of pi are lying! I could say that I know 500 digits of pi, its not true but I could say it. Call me from Missouri, but show me.

Actually, some if not most of us are telling the truth. At the time that I answered the survey, I seriously knew 101 digits of pi after the decimal (and I was pleased at the choice of dividing line between 51-100 and 101-250 :-) ). If you don't believe me, or anyone else who claims to know, then tough luck. There is no way to convince anyone that you memorized X number of digits of pi unless the person can see that you're not consulting a reference. I can say that pi = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679 8214808651 3282306647 (I memorized 19 more digits today), and I didn't use a reference (I didn't), but there's no way to convince anyone on the Internet that it is the truth.

Still, the number of people who responded "251+" is so many relative to the curve that I think about 90% are lying (please, no flames by the other 10%).

BTW, memorizing pi is not that hard. If you memorize 5 digits every day, you will know about 150 in a month. Just don't try to memorize 50 digits or so in one sitting, or you'll end up confusing yourself.

why is pi irrational when it is C/D, the ratio of 2 rational numbers?

First off, if the Circumference of a circle is rational the diameter wouldn't be. i.e. inverse pi times the circumference. inverse pi = 0.31830988618379.... So it is not true that both the circumferemce and diameter are both rational at the same time. Both can be irrational though.

I tend to get bored, so when I do, I turn on my calculator. I used a TI-30XA, then got an 83+. Anyhow, I don't know how to vote, but I know pi to 11+ digits.

I only know 10 digits. But even that's more than I've ever needed in real life.

I always just thought of pi as 22/7. It's way easier to remember than 3.14159 and it works out much easier in equations!...You guys still do math in math class, right?

22/7 =
3.1428571428571428571428571428571

Pi =
3.1415926535897932384626433832795

333/106 is almost as easy to remember and ten times more accurate.