Martin Wickens

Happy National Pi Day! Let’s talk Math. And you know it, I’m having some kind of pie today. It has to be done.

Have you ever wondered how many pounds weight of sugar there are in 232 hogsheads, if each one weighed 12cwt. 1 qr. 22lbs? If you haven’t guessed the answer, it is 323,408lbs. The child who gave the answer in the early nineteenth century, George Parker Bidder, became so famous for his skill with numbers that he found himself being challenged by Queen Charlotte with a question of her own.

“From the Land’s-end, Cornwall, to Farret’s-head in Scotland, is found by measurement to be 838 miles; how long would a snail be creeping that distance, at the rate of 8 feet per day.”

The answer? 553,080 days.

Most people leave complex math behind in school and never look back. But for some, Math is something they cannot get enough of.

And while I am pretty terrible at math, I am also amazed by its beauty and design and constancy.

All About Pi

On of the most fascinating numbers is pi.

Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It is commonly written as 3.14. They figured this out pretty closely in ancient times, though in recent years it has been extended to more and more decimal places.

The Egyptians used a value of 3 1/8, the Babylonians use 4(8/9 which converts to 3.125 and 3.16. We even find Pi in the Bible.

In 1 Kings 7:23 it describes the construction of the “molton sea” in the temple complex. It essentially describes Pi as 3. Which compared to the Egyptians and Babylonians seems less accurate. Two explanations are given. One is that the once you factor in the width of the rim, it naturally comes closer to the true number, 3.14. The second explanation is a bit more obscure and not really credible, but it is interesting,

A mystical explanation is much more enticing: due to the peculiarities of Hebrew pronunciation and spelling, the word ‘line’, or qwh, is pronounced qw. Totting up the numerological values of the letters gives 111 for qwh and 106 for qw. Multiplying three by gives 3.1415, which is pi correct to five significant figures.

Bellos, Alex. Alex’s Adventures in Numberland (p. 150). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

As mathematicians have strived to improve the accuracy of Pi they have made amazing discoveries.

Archimedes, of slipping in the bath fame, worked out pi to “3 10/71 < pi < 3 1/7. This translates to 3.14084 < pi < 3.14289, an accuracy of two decimal places. ” (Alex Bellos)

Using the same method of Archimedes, others continued working on the problem to get closer to the number’s true value. Liu Hui, a Chinese mathematician in the 3rd century, used the area of a polygon with 3072 sides to figure out pi to five decimal places, 3.14159. Now, to figure out his two decimal places Archimedes had to use polygons with 96 sides. When Tsu ChungChih came along in the 5th century, in order to advance the figure by one decimal place they had to use a polygon with 12,288 sides.

Are you beginning to get an idea of the difficulty in working out Pi’s true value the traditional wa?

When Arabic numbers we introduced, it allowed Mathamaticians to make great advances beyond what the Greeks and Chinese had been previously capabale. In 1596 Pi was worked out to 20 decimal places.

Others advanced it further, but the method used for 2000 years made it incredibly difficult and time-consuming.

But then so-called lightning calculators, or human calculators, like the child I mentioned at the beginning, demonstrated a way of figuring out pi much more quickly. One such lightning claculator, Zacharias Dase, worked out Pi to 200 decimal places in 1844. With some ups and downs along the way, the British dominated the Pi scene well into the 20th century. Solving it by long-hand got them as far as 808 places in 1947.

Then came computers as we know them and everything changed. In one 70-hour effort, a computer worked out pi to 2037 digits. And that number has escalated ever since.

But how accurate does it really need to be? With just 4 decimal places engineers can make precision instruments. With ten decimal places, you can calculate the circumference of the earth to within a fraction of a centimeter.

So Why Do I Need This Today?

So why do we need to know more? Why is a Christian pastor writing about this and taking up your time? Well, because of what has become apparent with the increased understanding of pi and how I believe it points to a Creator. God put everything into the building blocks of this universe for a reason, and to attribute this design to random chance takes more faith than many Christians ever muster.

• Pi is infinite. Just as God is infinite. In 2016 Peter Trub used his computer to work out pi to 22.4 trillion digits! And the number just goes on, never repeating.
• Pi is constant and unchanging. Regardless of the size of a circle, pi remains the same. Whether used by a farmer in Egypt 3000 years ago, or an engineer designing precision parts for space exploration in 2019, pi remains the same. Our God is unchanging, always the same.
• Pi shows design. Pi goes way beyond obscure math. Consider this description of the ubiquity of pi,

But pi’s ubiquity goes beyond math. The number crops up in the natural world, too. It appears everywhere there’s a circle, of course, such as the disk of the sun, the spiral of the DNA double helix, the pupil of the eye, the concentric rings that travel outward from splashes in ponds. Pi also appears in the physics that describes waves, such as ripples of light and sound. It even enters into the equation that defines how precisely we can know the state of the universe, known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Finally, pi emerges in the shapes of rivers. A river’s windiness is determined by its “meandering ratio,” or the ratio of the river’s actual length to the distance from its source to its mouth as the crow flies. Rivers that flow straight from source to mouth have small meandering ratios, while ones that lollygag along the way have high ones. Turns out, the average meandering ratio of rivers approaches — you guessed it — pi.

https://www.livescience.com/34132-what-makes-pi-special.html

Whether by an answered prayer for a new job, the wonder of the beauty on the scale of the Grand Canyon, in the building blocks of atoms and molecules, or the beauty of pi, we can see God’s hand in it all.