The Beauty of Pi | StarTalk

Ken: "How do you feel about math? Are you a madman?"

SC: "No, I'm not a mad SC, just what a mad would say about it. No, but think about it. Math is admitted as one of the most feared subjects in school. The phrase 'I was never good at math' is uttered more than 'I was never good at any other subject.' So, what gives?

Think of it this way: if you are training for a marathon, you would expect to be fast, right? So, I think the reason people believe they're not good at math is because there's this belief that if you're not good at math, you're born with that inability. And that's just so untrue.

So, how do you convey to people that you just encounter in the street that math is something beautiful? I don't actually do that for a living, but I think it will age my perspective on beauty.

Right? Can you do that with math?

Uh, okay, so let me give you an example. Let me tell you something you probably didn't know. Every March, we celebrate Pi Day, March 14. And by the way, I'm wearing a [Hudba] pie.

So here's the thing: while people even memorize 100 digits of pi, I think something is beautiful when you get patterns out of things that you don't expect to see patterns out of.

Killers sock this out. So, getting back to pi, so R was one of the people who could calculate pi, and believe it or not, he could tell you exactly what pi was by just writing down the odd numbers in order: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. He gave a procedure to exactly calculating pi.

So, you said he tamed pi? Yeah, it's not true that 3.1. Pi is 3.141, and eventually, nobody knows. If you're willing to be creative and rethink how you would write down that number, I can show you.

And I think we had an image of one of the patterns. Let's check it out. There you go! You see all those squares: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9. Everyone knows what comes next: 11, followed by 13. That's another way to write pi!

This is actually how I would write pi, and it's beautiful! The 3, the 1415 mess, that's that sequence of 1s. Like an infinite fraction, it goes on forever, but there's nothing hard about remembering that pattern.

I can't wait to show that to somebody!"