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@orangutan saidI thought this thread had to do with the book The Life of Pi. Guess I was in error.🫢
Mmm pie.
i have this infuriating habit of looking for, and finding,
stuff on the internet that means nothing to me but it might,
it just might, mean something to you
In the 1700s, French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc took a needle, a wooden floor, and a question that sounds almost childishly simple.
If you drop a needle randomly onto a surface ruled with parallel lines, and the needle's length equals the distance between those lines, what are the odds it crosses one of them?
The answer is 2 divided by pi.
No circles anywhere in that experiment. No curves, no arcs, no radii. Just a straight needle falling onto straight lines through pure chance. And pi crawls out of the probability like it was hiding there the entire time, waiting for someone to ask the right question.
Mathematicians call this Buffon's Needle, and it remains one of the most conceptually violent results in the history of probability. You can physically recreate it on your kitchen floor. Drop a needle 500 times, count the crossings, divide, and you will approximate pi to several decimal places through nothing but randomness and straight lines. The circle was never in the room. Pi showed up anyway.
This is what separates pi from every other mathematical constant. It doesn't stay inside its original context. It migrates. Euler discovered it hiding inside the sum of the reciprocals of all squared integers, a problem involving no geometry whatsoever. The Gaussian bell curve that governs how errors distribute in measurements, how heights vary in a population, how quantum particles spread across space, carries pi in its foundation even though the curve itself was never constructed from a circle.
Physicist Eugene Wigner wrote a paper in 1960 that never got the mainstream attention it deserved. He called it "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." His central bewilderment was precisely this pattern: mathematical structures developed in complete abstraction, with zero intention of describing physical reality, keep turning out to be the exact language the universe was already using before anyone looked.
Pi is his strongest case. It wasn't engineered to fit physics. It was found already fitted, in places nobody thought to look for it, in systems that share nothing geometrically with a circle.
The needle doesn't know about circles. The universe apparently does.
@Earl-of-Trumps saidI read that wrong initially...
Circumference just wouldn't be the same without Pi
@rookie54 saidAh, but there was a circle in the room. If you imagine the midpoint of the needle always landing on one point on the floor then all the positions that the ends of the needle might occupy create a circle. It's the needles orientation within that circle that either increases or decreases the chances of it fitting completely between the lines were the midpoint to land on a random position on the floor.
i have this infuriating habit of looking for, and finding,
stuff on the internet that means nothing to me but it might,
it just might, mean something to you
In the 1700s, French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc took a needle, a wooden floor, and a question that sounds almost childishly simple.
If you drop a needle randomly onto a surface ruled with parallel ...[text shortened]... geometrically with a circle.
The needle doesn't know about circles. The universe apparently does.
@XRB saidthis is well done
Ah, but there was a circle in the room. If you imagine the midpoint of the needle always landing on one point on the floor then all the positions that the ends of the needle might occupy create a circle. It's the needles orientation within that circle that either increases or decreases the chances of it fitting completely between the lines were the midpoint to land on a random position on the floor.
@rookie54 saidexcellent - best thing I have read all day
i have this infuriating habit of looking for, and finding,
stuff on the internet that means nothing to me but it might,
it just might, mean something to you
In the 1700s, French mathematician Georges-Louis Leclerc took a needle, a wooden floor, and a question that sounds almost childishly simple.
If you drop a needle randomly onto a surface ruled with parallel ...[text shortened]... geometrically with a circle.
The needle doesn't know about circles. The universe apparently does.
@XRB saidif you dare to make me think in the early morning before the woodpeckers truly get going
Ah, but there was a circle in the room.
before the coffee is brewed
before the ablutions in the loo
i shall
dammit
you may be correct
crap
@rookie54 saidlol
@Bish
SIR!
accusations of plagiary are taken very seriously in my shack!
No I meant between AI and now every single thought anyone has being published for all the world to see - sharing something fascinating and smart you found is worthy of props and kudos .
If I was going to accuse you of something, I would be more offensive about it. Subtlety is not my forte. 🙁