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Pi (/ˈpaɪ/; Ancient Greek /piː/ or /peî/, uppercase Π, lowercase π, cursive ϖ; Greek: πι) is the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, meaning units united, and representing the voiceless bilabial plosive IPA:.
The number π (/ p aɪ /; spelled out as "pi") is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, approximately equal to 3.14159. The number π appears in many formulae across mathematics and physics .
Historically, upper-case letters were used for representing points in geometry, and lower-case letters were used for variables and constants. Letters are used for representing many other sorts of mathematical objects. As the number of these sorts has remarkably increased in modern mathematics, the Greek alphabet and some Hebrew letters are also ...
A mathematical constant is a key number whose value is fixed by an unambiguous definition, often referred to by a symbol (e.g., an alphabet letter), or by mathematicians' names to facilitate using it across multiple mathematical problems. [1]
Greek letters are used in mathematics, science, engineering, and other areas where mathematical notation is used as symbols for constants, special functions, and also conventionally for variables representing certain quantities. In these contexts, the capital letters and the small letters represent distinct and unrelated entities.
The word is a play on the word "pi" itself and of the linguistic field of philology. There are many ways to memorize π, including the use of piems (a portmanteau, formed by combining pi and poem), which are poems that represent π in a way such that the length of each word (in letters) represents a digit. [1]
where C is the circumference of a circle, d is the diameter, and r is the radius.More generally, = where L and w are, respectively, the perimeter and the width of any curve of constant width.
For example, German mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen of the 16th century spent a major part of his life calculating the first 35 digits of pi. [22] Using computers and supercomputers , some of the mathematical constants, including π, e , and the square root of 2, have been computed to more than one hundred billion digits.