Monday, March 16, 2015

[#Critique] Is #pi #infinite?

Article / Resource
The infinite life of pi - Reynaldo Lopes



My Comments
This is a well-produced video in which the team took great care in producing an interesting narrative.  The circles were drawn imperfect and shaky, so as to catch the attention of viewers and to highlight them.  A couple of points they missed out:-

1) p being irrational, does not only have an infinite number of digits in its decimal expansion, the digits are also non-repeating.  A rational number (fraction) like 1/7 also has an infinite number of digits, but they repeat: 1/7 = 0.142857 142857 142857 ...

2) near the end of the video, the animators depicted universe < p.  I find the artistic licence disturbing.  I am sure there is some way to artistically depict the known universe having less number of atoms than number of digits of p.

To answer the question in the title of this article "Is p infinite?": No, but her number of decimal digits is.

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