The irrationals

Irrational numbers are pretty awesome. I’m not going to write something enlightening about them in a blog post. But, there are a few things that I find very interesting about them.

π

pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The circumference is slightly more than three times as long as its diameter. This is true no matter the size of the circle:

pi has been calculated to over a trillon decimal places. That is pretty interesting. Since the decimals go on forever, at some point your birthday, your phone number, your first word are all in π. Even a uuencoded .wav of your saying for first word is in there.

Go find out! Try MMDDYY and MMDDYYY! Woo!

e

e is the base of the natural logarithm.

We can do all kinds of things with e! Google likes e too… when they filed for its IPO, they raised $2,718,281,828. I guess the question is if they actually raised the $0.45 too.

Φ

phi (also sometimes φ) is also known as the golden ratio.

This ratio can also be approximated from the Fibonacci sequence (another bright light), in which each term is the sum of the previous two terms: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,…The further along you go in the Fibonacci sequence, the closer the ratio of consecutive terms is to Φ.

_{source: wikimedia}