Almost everyone of us
have listened to this rhyme as a child. In English, the rhyme translates to
“Laddu is round, poodi is round. Fat man’s potbelly is round. Earth is round,
sky is round. The whole cosmos is round round!”
This rhyme was usually
taught to us in the English class, but if it was taught in the mathematics
class, your math teacher would probably tell you that everything that is round,
or circular, carries a mysterious number called “pi.”
Pi is the God of the
mathematical world. It never ends, it lasts forever, and it never changes. Basically,
it is immortal.
Spiritual mystics
sometimes call it the ”Absolute truth” or the “universal constant.”
You may be fascinated
to know that in ancient times, understanding this number wasn’t just curiosity,
but a necessity, especially for astronomers and architects. Greeks and
Egyptians exhausted every method to calculate the full decimal expression of
pi, ultimately surrendering to the fact that it is just eternal, infinite, non-terminating,
and unchangeable.
In math books, pi is
represented by the symbol of two vertical legs supporting a horizontal roof,
like a table, with value represented either as 22 by 7 or 3.14….
These dots after the
decimal represent the never-ending decimal expression of pi, with first two
digits always remaining the same 14. It is also represented by the formula:
circumference of the circle divided by twice the radius or the diameter.
Scientists have spent
centuries decoding the mystery of pi, trying to calculate its complete value by
using strings to measure the circle, sometimes using sophisticated
supercomputers, but they never quite reached the end. Even after trillions of
digits, the number didn’t seem to end.
Pi is not just the God
of the mathematical world, but also the secret hiding in everything that is
shaped like a circle. The Ferry wheel, the merry-go-round, the planetary
orbits, the chapattis your mom makes, even the brightness of stars.
So the next time you are visiting a temple to worship God, don’t forget to ask the priest why didn’t they put a sculpture of this fascinating mathematical God pi alongside the sculptures of other gods and goddesses.
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