It is pi day!!! It snuck up on me. I was going to make a top ten of cool facts about pi - by stealing them from the internet, of course. But most of those are not math applications, just cool trivia with virtually no applications, e.g., in a Star Trek episode, Spoke once defeated a computer by commanding it to compute the last digit of pi.Brainstorm. Combine the two into the top ten applications of pi. And also doing so by stealing them from the internet. All wrapped up in one tidy package. By the way, I understand some of these applications fully and some not very well at all. I will try to give a short internet-stolen explanation for these.
- Circumference of a circle.
- Area of a circle.
- Volume of a sphere.
- Surface area of a sphere.
- Cosmological constant - Value of the energy density of the vacuum of space. Originally introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917.
- Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - Precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle (such as momentum and position) can be known. Joke break: Heisenberg is driving down the road and is pulled over by a police officer. Police: "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?" Heisenberg: "No, but I know exactly where I am."
- Einstein's field equations of general relativity - Describes the fundamental interaction of gravitation as a result of space time being curved by mass and energy.
- Coulomb's Law - Force between two charged particles.
- Period of a pendulum.
- Buckling formula - Finds the stress an object can handle before "buckling" would occur.
