An Explanation for Everything

The Ridiculous Way We Used To Calculate Pi
Veritasium

I'm thinking about how calculating a zillion digits of π is like the intellectual equivalent of peacock feathers (I am sure I am quoting someone here), or as the bald guy (Professor Alex Kontorovich from Rutgers) says:

So this goes way beyond precision for any practical purpose, this is now a matter of flexing your muscles, this is showing off just how much mathematical power you have that you can work out a constant like π to very high precision.

Then it comes to me that what we all want is to be entertained, something that absorbs all of our attention, because when our attention is totally occupied, we don't concern ourselves with boring stuff. We are occupied and we are entertained. And nothing captures our attention better than competition. Trying to beat the other guy is what everyone is striving for. Sometimes it's just a matter of slipping in the right word to stab an opponent with a nasty insult, sometimes it's just an embellishment to your clothing to catch someone's eye, often it's a matter of making more money. Competitions can become heated and result in pushing, escalate into fighting and eventually boil over into war. And when we go to war, there is no end to the complexity of the weapons we build, and when you are building complex weapons you need math, and so you might want the guys who display the intellectual equivalent of peacock feathers helping out on designing weapons.

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I'm watching this video and I realize that I wrote a program to compute π using several different techniques, one of which was very similar to the method used in the beginning of the video of cutting up a circle into triangles. I thought I had posted it earlier, but I could not find it on my blog. I rooted around on my computer and found it (it's from 2012). I posted it on github.

My program uses floating point numbers to perform the calculations, so it is going to be limited to only a few digits of pi. I should modify it to use the GMP math package so I can get as many digits as Ludolph did.