Pi

I return once more, with a startling proposal. In the scientific spirit that governs this here blog, I am about to shake the mathematical world to its very foundations.

The basis of what I am about to lies shortly after prehistoric times, when the ancient Greeks started drawing stick figures on the ground, and thus realised that the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter is a constant number, and is approximately 3.14, as we all know.

However, it is this very approximation wherein lies the problem. Pi is not exactly 3.14, and since people realized that, they tried to find its exact value. A few years later, some party pooper proved that pi has no exact value, and spoiled it for everyone. Ever since that time, people have been trying to outdo each other in finding as many digits of pi as they can. The real reason behind this struggle for dominance is the fact that they have small penes (it's the plural of penis, look it up), since there is no use for knowing more than a hundred digits of pi, and we are currently somewhere in the billions.

What I am about to propose will single-handedly facilitate calculations with circles and stop those pesky people from contributing to global warming by running massive supercomputers all day to churn out decimal digits of pi.

Hearken, for it is revolutionary.

I move to redefine the value of 1!

If we redefine 1 to pi/3, then pi will equal exactly 3, and, therefore, no more trouble. We could also redefine it as e/3 but I like pi more, and I don't see as many people scrambling to compute digits of e. Other ramifications of this would be that everything would change, except some arbitrary values. For example, the height of everything would be slightly less, since 1 will slightly increase in value. Money, time, etc will remain the same, since it was arbitrarily defined anyway.

This change would have other far-reaching consequences, which I am currently unable to ponder because of hunger, though I am sure it would make everyone's lives better, except for the people who tried to compute pi, who will, apart from being out of a job, also have slightly shorter penes.

Update: It appears that some people have already tried, but have gone the wrong way, trying to redefine the value of pi instead of 1. That's stupid, pi is a number, you can't just redefine its value. Idiots.

Great concept.. But although

Great concept.. But although it sounds really appealing there are many splinters (big or small) that render this theory useless. First of all, if we redefined 1 to pi/3 it would be more like 1,04 and if you think that this is barely noticeable, try 100 which will be 104,71 and 10.000 will be 10471,97 that looks far from "slighty". Also, 1 defines quantity, i'd like to see you at the greengrocer's asking for 1.04 apple(s) -even plural gets "confused"!-. And many more...

On the other hand, I myself have many questioned the integrity of our numeric system. It is kinda stupid to spend a ton of money on researches trying to understand other dimensions and other worlds when we haven't actually got the 3 we already know. Numbers like pi, e and fi (golden ratio) are crucial to understand how nature works and we still use them approximately. It is a very large subject that i believe it could be somehow solved but it would need massive worldwide changes etc..

(ps. Note that there is something similar going on with prime numbers. We can find primes with 9.243.573 digits -at least thats the longest one i know of- but still no way to calculate them other that brute forcing...)

Submitted by Inzoy on Tue, 16/01/2007 - 17:11.
Re: Concept

Your comments are very insightful, but 1.04 apples is a small price to pay compared to being able to calculate pi accurately! You would have to ask for 0.97 apples, sadly.
Also, everything else!
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Vidi, Vici, Veni.

Submitted by Poromenos on Tue, 16/01/2007 - 18:16.

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