I know we have an above average number of mathematicians on intfic. My dad taught high school maths. He’s just gone into aged care.
I’ve been looking through his things and found an amusing quiz question he shared to a 1979 issue of journal “The Australian Mathematics Teacher”. He’d told me this trivia before as something funny, but I never knew he’d shared it this way.
Whence Pi?
Who was the first person recorded as having used the symbol “π” for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter?
Was it A. Euclid, B. Archimedes, C. Pythagoras, D. Euler, or E. Bill Jones?
The answer is
Summary
E. The first recorded use of “π” in this sense was made by William Jones in 1706 in his work “Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos”.
His son, Sir William Jones, was the person who basically founded the field of historical linguistics. (Which I also didn’t know until I recognized the name and looked up whether they were the same person.)
I’ve always been fascinated with using PI as a Y/N random answer function. While it has never been proven mathematically, the bits of PI, for all intents and purposes, are statistically normal in the state transitions from 0-1 and from 1-0. The same seemingly holds for the states staying the same 0-0, 1-1. 25% chance of each category happening. Since it has already been calculated for over a thousand trillion bits, it can be used as a looping yes/no machine without the overhead of computing it. I’ve always wanted to make a Mark I CGI gateway that had a PI function for this purpose. For statistical sampling, it would be an ideal selector.
Really should have guessed it was the mathematical nobody given the other choices are the rockstars who sometimes get credit for stuff they had nothing to do with(Pythagoras is probably the biggest for this, getting credit for possibly the most famous equation that isn’t E=Mc^2 when the theorem predates him by centuries if I’m not mistaken and the equation form of the theorem is modern since algebraic notation wasn’t a thing to the Ancient Greeks… My guess was Euler sincehe did so much its a joke in math nerd circles that they had to start naming stuff for the second person to discover it to avoid everything being named for Euler and again, Algebraic notation being pretty modern in general and the ancients working almost entirely in geometric figures and descriptive text.
Kind of funny a number nerd ended up with a word nerd for a son though.
Also never occurred to me that well known constants believed to be normal would make for good pseudo RNG that’s predetermined… Granted, whenever I’ve needed RNG in my own code, I’ve always used the language’s default rand() function and giving it a fixed seed if I need to remove the randomness for testing purposes.
Well, I think by the standards of the general population, I’m still a number nerd But by the standards of anyone who went on to study maths at tertiary level, or the inherently maths-ultra-interested, I’m probably not.
There was definitely a computer rock-paper-scissors competition a while back that seeded the field with entries like a program that based its plays on the digits of pi - theoretically 100% exploitable for an opponent who identifies the pattern but indistinguishable from playing at random otherwise.
But by the standards of anyone who went on to study maths at tertiary level, or the inherently maths-ultra-interested, I’m probably not.