Pi pops up where you don’t expect it

We know pi appears when we talk about circles. But it appears in many other places, too. Why, pi, why?

By: Lorenzo Sadun, The University of Texas at Austin, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: March 14, 2026

Words: 944

Last Updated: 4 months, 3 weeks ago

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By Lorenzo Sadun, The University of Texas at Austin

Happy Pi Day, where we celebrate the world’s most famous number. The exact value of π=3.14159… has fascinated people since ancient times, and mathematicians have computed trillions of digits. But why do we care? Would it actually matter if somebody got the 11,137,423,895,285th digit wrong?

Probably not. The world would keep on turning (with a circumference of 2πr). What matters about π isn’t so much the actual …

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