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0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk. |
0:09.0 | I hope you enjoy the program. |
0:11.0 | Hello, in the Bible's description of Solomon's Temple it comes out as three. |
0:16.0 | Archimedes in the third century calculated it to the third century, calculated it to the |
0:22.0 | equivalent of 14 decimal places and today supercomputers have |
0:25.9 | defined it with an extraordinary of accuracy to its first 1.4 trillion digits but there |
0:31.2 | are more to come it's the longest number in nature, probably the most |
0:34.7 | potent, and we need only its first 32 figures to calculate the size of the known universe |
0:40.1 | within the accuracy of one proton. I'm talking about pie, 3.14159 etc etc. |
0:47.2 | the number which describes the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. |
0:51.2 | How has something so commonplace in nature been such a challenge |
0:54.8 | for mathematics? And what does the ubiquitous nature of Pie tell us about the hidden complexities |
1:00.2 | of our |
1:03.0 | Eleanor Robson, lecturer in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at |
1:06.5 | Cambridge University. |
1:07.5 | Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, |
1:10.8 | and Professor Robert Kaplan, co-founder of the Math Circle at Harvard University |
1:14.9 | and co-author of the Art of the Infinite. |
1:17.4 | Robert Kaplan, to start with you, why is Pie so important? |
1:22.2 | I think of it as historically the first of the slippery numbers. |
1:26.0 | It means so much to us both in practical terms, finding out the area, the circumference of a circle, but also in trying to come to |
1:35.6 | grips with what numbers are and yet like a virus it keeps slipping through |
... |
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