Pi

The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter--pi--is usually given in schoolbooks as "approximately" 3.1416 or 3.14159. As a decimal it can never be expressed exactly, but the decimal value has been carried out by patient mathematicians to 707 digits. At the Paris Fair last year this huge number was written, for the edification of fairgoers, round & round in a spiral on the inside wall of a circular room.

A worker on pi is Dr. Horace Scudder Uhler of Yale. He is not extending the decimal value of pi itself any further, but he labors on the values of derivatives, such as the square of pi, the logarithm of pi, the fraction one over pi. In Washington last week it was disclosed that Dr. Uhler had turned in to the National Academy of Sciences a value for the logarithm of pi carried out to 215 decimal places, and a value for the square of pi carried out to 262 decimal places.*

* Dr. Uhler admitted that there might be a slight error in the last digit of one of his values but he had checked and rechecked to hold the possible error to a minimum. "Even a single false digit," said he, "in the published value of a basic constant can cause incalculable loss of time and energy."

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