3.14159…. so on and so forth, but my question is *why* and *how* did we decide or learn that those digits were of pi if it’s an irrational number? if it never ends couldn’t you technically just make it up? like i saw a news article, a woman/her team calculated TRILLIONS of digits of pi—how is that possible?
In: Mathematics
pi can be written as the result of an infinite sum of rational numbers. While it’s impossible to compute an infinite sum, what you can do is use an appriximation of the formula.
By summing only the first 1000 terms of the sum, you will already have a result very close to pi. And if you want an even higher precision with more decimals, you can sum the first 10000 terms instead.
That’s also the way your calculator will compute the value of sin(2) or e^2.4. These irrational numbers can also be written as an infinite sum of rational numbers.
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