Beautiful and mysterious is the life of / with Pi!

Except that, in our daily rush, we barely have / make time to reflect on it.

But is the "physical" the only side of life...?

We propose you to step back and allow, for a change, some room for Vita Contemplativa... and then, afterwards, allow it to connect with, and even influence, its very opposite, Vita Activa.

So, let us imagine that we can design a "house," or something else, where Pi is central, or at least partially used.

Maybe we cannot allocate to this problem as much time as those who spent a lifetime trying to "square the circle," but maybe, for a change, we can start making small but courageous steps in that direction. It is fascinating to read, see below, that the ancient Egyptians used Pi to dimension the Great Pyramid at Giza, or that Archimedes made rigorous calculations of it or that Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmīthe, the Arab mathematician, expressed his knowledge of this "irrational" number in the 9th century and that in the 12th century Maimonides did that as well... until in 1882 Ferdinand von Lindemann proved that besides being an "irrational" number Pi was also a "transcendental" one, thus proving once and for all that the perennial quest for "squaring the circle" was in fact an impossibility...

But what a beautiful chance, now, when a French software scientist (see below) discovered the longest numeric expression of the mysterious Pi to reconnect with its long and prestigious history, and thus continue it creatively...! Reconnect with the poetry of high mathematics, dear architect, with its speculative idealism, and thus rescue us from the terrible prose we are faced with, every day...! We want to be able to breathe again, and we believe that Pi can help us, as it did in the past...!  

Please see below a few relevant short texts to the theme of the competition. More information can be found on the web, starting with Wikipedia... just type in, Pi...!

"The earliest evidenced conscious use of an accurate approximation for the length of a circumference with respect to its radius is of 3+1/7 in the designs of the Old Kingdom pyramids in Egypt. The Great Pyramid at Giza, constructed c.2550-2500 BC, was built with a perimeter of 1760 cubits and a height of 280 cubits; the ratio 1760/280 ≈ 2π. Egyptologists such as Professors Flinders Petrie [30] and I.E.S Edwards[31] have shown that these circular proportions were deliberately chosen for symbolic reasons by the Old Kingdom scribes and architects.[32][33] The same apotropaic proportions were used earlier at the Pyramid of Meidum c.2600 BC. This application is archaeologically evidenced, whereas textual evidence does not survive from this early period."

AFP/File – A French software engineer said he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that …

Fri Jan 8, 10:08 am ET

PARIS (AFP) – A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.

Fabrice Bellard told AFP he used an inexpensive desktop computer -- and not a supercomputer used in past records -- to calculate Pi to nearly 2.7 trillion decimal places.

That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.

Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.577 billion digits.

Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion.

The gear cost "a bit less than 2,000 euros" (3,000 dollars), Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.

"It is a completely standard PC. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.5-teraoctet hard disks. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk."

Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation.

Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Bellard told AFP.

Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organism keen on hosting the record, he said.

Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, kicks off with 3.14159... in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end.

Bellard said he was "not especially interested" in Pi's digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.

"Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge," he wrote.