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Comment on The Uselessness of Pi

Conceive a sphere constructed with the earth at it center, and imagine it surface to pass through Sirius, which is 8.8 light years distant from the earth... Then imagine this enormous sphere to be so packed with microbes that in every cubic millimeter millions and millions of these diminutive animalcula are present. Now conceive these microbes to be unpacked and so distributed singly along a straight line that every two microbes are as far distant from each other as Sirius is from us... Conceive the long line thus fixed by all the microbes at the diameter of a circle, and imagine its circumference to be calculated by multiplying it diameter by Pi to 100 decimal places. Then, in the case of a circle of this enormous magnatude even, the circumference so calculated would not vary from the real circumference by a millionth part of a millimeter.

This example will suffice to show that the calculation of Pi to 100 or 500 decimal places is wholly useless.

- Hermann Schubart, A mathematics professor from Hamburg, Germany in 1889

Source: Schubert, H., The Squaring of the Circle. Contained in Mathematical Essays and Recerations, Translation from the German, Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, 1899

(Which, in turn, I found in The History of Pi, by Petr Beckmann, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1971).

from Godlong's Glossary

Pi.

1. The Greek letter P or p, corresponding to the roman p.
2. A number, represented by said letter, expressing the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of pi has been calculated to many millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not smooth. Nature herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when they get sufficiently small, as Prof. Heisenberg has pointed out. However, the continued extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.