My first thought was "well of course it is, since pi is a little larger than 3" but it was cool to see an actual derivation of how much pi squared differs from 10 as a nice, closed form series.
I remember discovering that pi x 10^7 is very close to the number of seconds in a year while at uni.
One of my tutors was convinced this had to be more than coincidence, but I always figured it was just chance and a nice but sometimes useful shortcut...
You might be able to send someone down an amusing (to observers) rabbit hole of wrongness by telling them it is not exact because Earth’s orbit is not perfectly circular.
I was a little disappointed that the upper range of gravity on earth only goes to 9.8337. Just a little more and there would have been somewhere on earth that was an exact match.
It would have been the ideal (if chilly) place to start a cult.
The second fact, pi^2 ~= g, is famous enough that it has a separate section in Wikipedia [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_coincidence#Gravi...
And https://xkcd.com/1047/
Also https://xkcd.com/217/
My first thought was "well of course it is, since pi is a little larger than 3" but it was cool to see an actual derivation of how much pi squared differs from 10 as a nice, closed form series.
If you don't unblock scripts from cdn.jsdelivr.net.cdn.cloudflare.net, the math code won't work.
I remember discovering that pi x 10^7 is very close to the number of seconds in a year while at uni.
One of my tutors was convinced this had to be more than coincidence, but I always figured it was just chance and a nice but sometimes useful shortcut...
You might be able to send someone down an amusing (to observers) rabbit hole of wrongness by telling them it is not exact because Earth’s orbit is not perfectly circular.
You're such an evil person :D
This first became apparent to me when I got a slide rule. Pi is often marked on the various scales and an x^2 scale is often nearby the x scale.
As an ex-physicist, pi^2 is 10. Like g.
I get it that this is a nice calculation with the Zeta function and everything, but 3 and a small something squared will be near 10 so it is 10.
I was a little disappointed that the upper range of gravity on earth only goes to 9.8337. Just a little more and there would have been somewhere on earth that was an exact match.
It would have been the ideal (if chilly) place to start a cult.
The author wants tau=2*pi, but in the Greek alphabet, tau has one vertical stroke, and pi has two.
So, visually in Greek, pi=2*tau would seem an improvement.
Oh, well.
Tau is tau over 1, pi is tau over 2. See also https://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto#sec-conflict_and_resist...
pi's prevalence instead of tau is one of the strongest indicators that we live in a suboptimal timeline.