Happy pi approximation day! 22/7
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tuxchick Jul 22, 2009 6:17 PM EDT |
This is an official geek holiday. The other pi approximation day is March 14, which in the US method of date notation is mm/dd, or 03/14. Party hearty, geeks! |
| KernelShepard Jul 22, 2009 7:48 PM EDT |
Is this a valid excuse to eat some pie? I sure hope so! |
| TxtEdMacs Jul 22, 2009 8:04 PM EDT |
I glad you did not say cake ... because not too long after wards it was off with their heads! So I delicately ask, how does 22/07 or even 07/22 come anywhere close to approximating pi. It's not even half a pie*. Or do you see it as a whole pie? I am confused. YBT * If divided by 2. |
| tuxchick Jul 22, 2009 8:18 PM EDT |
TxtEdMacs, it all makes sense on a pi chart. |
| tracyanne Jul 22, 2009 9:52 PM EDT |
But surely not in the US where it would have been 7/22 |
| tuxchick Jul 22, 2009 9:53 PM EDT |
TA, in this brave new global society, we cherry-pick whatever calendar format suits us. ;) |
| tuxchick Jul 22, 2009 9:54 PM EDT |
OMG that was like an instant response, how creepy. I'm not stalking you, really I'm not! I just came in from outside! Really! I swear on the Sacred Official Pi Approximation Day Convenience Calendar! |
| gus3 Jul 22, 2009 10:27 PM EDT |
Ancient Egyptian math worked only with fractions, so 22/7 was the closest they could get. |
| jdixon Jul 22, 2009 10:47 PM EDT |
> Ancient Egyptian math worked only with fractions, so 22/7 was the closest they could get. Say what you will about the ancient Egyptians, they were entirely rational. :) |
| jezuch Jul 23, 2009 2:17 AM EDT |
Quoting:Ancient Egyptian math worked only with fractions, so 22/7 was the closest they could get. If they dug a bit deeper, they would find 355/113, just as I did sometime in my teens armed with boredom, some free time and a calculator. |
| golem Sep 18, 2009 6:55 PM EDT |
jezuch: Nice work :) But 22/7 is accurate to within 4 parts in 10,000, and they may not have needed or been able to measure things more precisely than that. |
| montezuma Sep 18, 2009 7:06 PM EDT |
355/113 is much better. |
| hkwint Sep 18, 2009 8:53 PM EDT |
Now we need a calendar with 355 moths and 113 days per month. For myself, I like the approximation with the Taylor-series better, but there's no faculty day in the calendar I'm afraid. |
| tracyanne Sep 18, 2009 9:09 PM EDT |
Quoting:Now we need a calendar with 355 moths Yuch, I hope not. |
| gus3 Sep 19, 2009 11:23 AM EDT |
3:55am on January 13th. A pi minute once every year. |
| da_winkel Oct 16, 2009 4:54 AM EDT |
hey 22/7 is my b'day does that make me a mathematical genius? |
| TxtEdMacs Oct 16, 2009 10:44 AM EDT |
da'wink, Only if the year were '09* and you just taught yourself to read and write ... I guess that standard is a bit over bearing, since that would make you an all around genius. YBT * well, being too tough here, '08, '07 and even '06 would qualify for geniushood. |
| hkwint Oct 16, 2009 1:07 PM EDT |
Quoting:does that make me a mathematical genius? Did your mother told you not to look into the sun? And did you look in the sun anyway? |
| jdixon Oct 16, 2009 9:07 PM EDT |
> hey 22/7 is my b'day
does that make me a mathematical genius? Possibly. But if so it also makes you irrational. :) |
| TxtEdMacs Oct 16, 2009 10:02 PM EDT |
Quoting:> hey 22/7 is my b'day does that make me a mathematical genius?But sadly that would make him merely one of very * many. YBT * Take any pair of adjacent rational numbers and determine the number of irrational numbers between the pair**. ** An infinite number, that led Kantor to postulate a symbol representing infinity of infinities*** that leads to logical fallacy if one begins defining infinity as the sequence of integers that can be increased with no limit. That is, adding one more integer to any large number. *** which I remember as infinity raised to the infinite power. |
| gus3 Oct 16, 2009 10:31 PM EDT |
Quoting:if so it also makes you irrational. :)If so, that makes 22/7 the first irrational fraction I've ever encountered. |
| Scott_Ruecker Oct 17, 2009 12:03 AM EDT |
Would 1/0 count? I mean, can you have one of nothing? But then math was never my strong suit.. |
| gus3 Oct 17, 2009 12:52 AM EDT |
Quoting:gus3@paul$ cat divzero.c #include <stdio.h> How very odd. No SIGFPE, with both SSE and x87 options. |
| jezuch Oct 17, 2009 8:09 AM EDT |
Quoting:How very odd. No SIGFPE, with both SSE and x87 options. Floating point arithmetic never raises an exception. Instead, you can get values like +inf, -inf and NaN (Not a Number). The latter is especially interesting in that if it appears in only one place it "infects" all subsequent calculations turning them all to NaN. Like a quark bomb. |
| bigg Oct 17, 2009 8:54 AM EDT |
In Fortran (don't know much about C), you can catch an error like that with the right compiler option: program divbyzero implicit none real :: a = 0.0 write(*,*) 5.0/a end program divbyzero Quoting:gus3@paul$ gfortran divbyzero.f95 -o divbyzero gus3@paul$ ./divbyzero +Infinity Quoting:gus3@paul$ gfortran divbyzero.f95 -o divbyzero -ffpe-trap=zero gus3@paul$ ./divbyzero Floating point exception |
| Scott_Ruecker Oct 17, 2009 9:07 AM EDT |
So I take it my 1/0 thing was lame because whatever you guys are typing makes my eyes hurt. ;-) |
| bigg Oct 17, 2009 9:24 AM EDT |
> So I take it my 1/0 thing was lame Humor is usually lost on nerds. |
| gus3 Oct 17, 2009 11:38 AM EDT |
Quoting:So I take it my 1/0 thing was lameNot at all. It was a teaching moment. Now I'm reading fenv(3). I want to see how to make it raise a div-zero exception on that instruction. |
| jezuch Oct 17, 2009 5:55 PM EDT |
Quoting:Now I'm reading fenv(3). I want to see how to make it raise a div-zero exception on that instruction. Ah, I should have written "...never raises an exception *by default*" ;) The IEEE floating point spec provides a lot of plumbing, like traps and rounding modes. I forget about that because my main language is Java and it doesn't expose any of this (which led at least one expert to write a paper called "Java's FP hurts everyone everywhere"). |
| gus3 Oct 17, 2009 6:03 PM EDT |
"Java: Write once, hurt everywhere." I like it. |
| hkwint Oct 17, 2009 7:52 PM EDT |
Quoting:So I take it my 1/0 thing was lame because whatever you guys are typing makes my eyes hurt. ;-) How 'bout this: Start xcalc, type 1/0 followed by Enter, result is: inf. Meaning you can have one of nothing infinitely. Myself, I don't have one of nothing, I have much of nothing. |
| gus3 Oct 17, 2009 8:37 PM EDT |
"I got plenty o' nuthin'
And nuthin's plenty for me..." If 1/0 == infinity Then 0 * infinity == 1 But 0 * N == 0, for any N Therefore, by deduction, 1/0 != infinity I'd rather have the SIGFPE. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 17, 2009 8:48 PM EDT |
Gus, there's a flaw in that logic. Infinity is not part of N, so these two are both true at the same time: 0 * infinity = 1 0 * N = 0 |
| hkwint Oct 17, 2009 9:38 PM EDT |
Infinity is not a number, so performing arithmetic with something that's not a number doesn't make sense. I guess that's why we like it so much. |
| gus3 Oct 17, 2009 10:09 PM EDT |
Curiouser and curiouser. If I change the floats to ints, I do get a SIGFPE. A floating-point exception. On the integer division instruction. |
| mortenalver Oct 19, 2009 6:40 AM EDT |
There's no such number as infinity, so 1/0 is really undefined mathematically. However, if you look at the limit when the denominator approaches 0, you find that the value approaches infinity, so it's not terribly illogical for the function to return Inf (it's still not correct, though). |
| jezuch Oct 19, 2009 2:52 PM EDT |
Quoting:However, if you look at the limit when the denominator approaches 0, you find that the value approaches infinity, so it's not terribly illogical for the function to return Inf (it's still not correct, though). Yes, and not only because if you approach 0 from the other side, you get negative infinity as the limit :) |
| gus3 Oct 19, 2009 2:58 PM EDT |
Or, more succinctly, "F(x)=1/x" is discontinuous at x=0. |
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