Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label mathematics

How do we know pi is an irrational number?

  From - Live Science By  Victoria Atkinson   Edited by - Amal Udawatta Irrational numbers go on and on. How do we know that pi has no ending?   (Image credit: kr7ysztof/Getty Images) Are there mathematical ways to prove that pi is an irrational number that has no end? Originally defined as the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter,  pi  — written as the Greek letter π — appears throughout mathematics, including in areas that are completely unconnected to circles such as chemistry, physical sciences and medicine. Pi belongs to a huge mathematical group called irrational numbers, which go on forever and cannot be written as fractions. Scientists have calculated pi to  105 trillion digits , although most of us are more familiar with the approximation 3.14. But how do we know that pi is an irrational number? Rational numbers, which make up the majority of numbers we use in day-to-day life (although less than half of all possible num...