OT - pi in the Bible

Does he describe how Pi was described in Cuneiform (Sumerian) and Greek ?? Which of the three languages is older?

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

It's actually hard to tell, since Hebrew was originally Aramaic, and that's an OLD one.

LLoyd

I bring this up because others have brought up that pi according to the Bible is 3.

Tonight I heard a Rabbi teaching on the verse where this comes from, it's about a 10 cubit diameter with a 30 cubit circumference.

The Rabbi took this back to the Hebrew, where letters have numerical value, and showed the word they get 10 for the diameter from is 10.6 (10 + .6) but the word the 30 comes from is 3 X 10, but the word for 10 there is actually

I didn't find the show with this on but the Rabbi's website is:

RogerN

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Here. You can entertain yourself for an hour or two with the source of this claim:

Tsaban, Boaz and David Garber. "On the Rabbinical Approximation of pi." Historia Mathematica 25, Article HM972185. Academic Press, 1998

Archimedes computed pi way before anyone else.

John

John wrote in news:RNednVVNhYjxkFvOnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

Not even close. It was known to the ancient Egyptians, some fifteen or twenty centuries before Archimedes, that 220/71 < pi < 22/7.

"Artemus" fired this volley in news:lq6hnb$tqq$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

That's an interesting artifact of fooling around with the math, but it assumes prior knowledge of pi's _exact_ value (to many digits), in order to know if it was a useful number trick.

Do you have information saying how the 'ancients' arrived at that pretty ratio?

LLoyd

If you take the first 3 odd integers and double them up thusly 113355. Then divide 113 into 355, yields approx pi. Accurate to 2.66e-7. Good enough to calculate the circumference of the earth within less than a foot. Art

Is that circumference the Great Circle through Peoria and Ho-Ho-Kus, or the Great Circle through the Himalayas and Miami Beach?

How *much* less than a foot?

Numerologists like precision, you know.

"Ed Huntress" fired this volley in news:a3Axv.12452$ snipped-for-privacy@fx07.iad:

Numerologists could give a rat's ass about precision. All they look for is hidden "meaning" in numbers.

Mathematicians like precision.

LLoyd

"Artemus" wrote in news:lq6hnb$tqq$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

True.

Untrue.

The error is slightly more than eleven feet.

"Ed Huntress" fired this volley in news:a3Axv.12452$ snipped-for-privacy@fx07.iad:

Numerologists could give a rat's ass about precision. All they look for is hidden "meaning" in numbers.

Mathematicians like precision.

LLoyd

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Unless they use a slide rule.

"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" wrote in news:XnsA36C98BE972D0lloydspmindspringcom@216.168.3.70:

The 'ancients' didn't arrive at that ratio. It was discovered by Zu Chongzhi (A.D. 429 - 500):

Since the Earth isn't a precise sphere does it really matter? Art

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Only in one sense: That degree of precision for the circumference of the earth is absurd, unless you apply a bunch of caveats. For example, because it's fractal, you have to specify the lengths over which you're averaging, and what you do about decreasing radii. Your "circumference" will have at least one of those, up to many trillions.

Therefore, besides being a meaningless relationship to pi, the claimed precision has a meaningless relationship to the circumference of the earth.

"Artemus" fired this volley in news:lq6jde$b74$2@dont- email.me:

My first one was SLOW 4-speed. When they first came out in the $200.00 range, I built one from junk, out-of-spec parts from PolyPaks (remember them?)

It was a 4-chip set, plus display drivers, and ate nearly an amp at 5VDC.

Lloyd

Doug Miller fired this volley in news:XnsA36C9C74221B6dougmilmaccom@78.46.70.116:

Do you wonder how he confirmed its precision?

Lloyd

This ancient learned it in college when the 4 speed calculators first were available. Prior to that ??? Art ========================================================

My favorite book on this is "The History of PI" by Petr Beckmann. Great chapters on each culture and their development of more and more accurate values of pi, plus the start of the "digit hunters" from hand calcs to computers up to first million digits (written in 1971 or 2). Find a library with a copy.

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

If you take the first 3 odd integers and double them up thusly 113355. Then divide 113 into 355, yields approx pi. Accurate to 2.66e-7. Good enough to calculate the circumference of the earth within less than a foot. Art

"Ed Huntress" fired this volley in news:sBAxv.3588$ snipped-for-privacy@fx27.iad:

But the earth was a perfect sphere when the ancients came up with pi. It was only in modern times that it started to swell at the waist (probably from middle-agedness or over[h]eating), and get wrinkles (probably from middle-agedness; all that UV and stuff).

LLoyd

Since the Earth isn't a precise sphere does it really matter? Art

This ancient learned it in college when the 4 speed calculators first were available. Prior to that ??? Art