I saw recently that you would only need 39 decimals of pi to calculate the diameter of the observable universe to the margin of a single hydrogen atom. So then how in the world do people make the calculations to find more digits of pi? How did we get to so many?
In: Mathematics
One of the cool things about Pi is that it tends to pop up in unexpected places in math. It turns out that Pi can be reached by a ton of different formulae. For example, Pi = 4 – 4/3 + 4/5 – 4/7 +…
By calculating more and more terms of this series, you get values closer and closer to the actual value of pi. In practice we don’t use this series, because it takes a long time to converge (you need to add a lot of elements for each digit you want to calculate). There are other, more efficient formulae which computers use.
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