I've been searching for around an hour at this point and I didn't get really definite answers. A lot of answers are along the lines of "because circles exist" etc. But what I want to know is why circles cause pi. What causes the phenomenon of pi, not pi itself.
Anonymous
Because it's a ratio. No matter what size the circle is the ratio remains the same.
Think of taking a photo of a circle. It doesn't matter if you're very close and it looks big, or a long way away and it looks small, it's the same circle, and the proportions are always the same.
It's similar to the area of a triangle, always half the height times the base!
?
Frankly my take is that it is the simplest of the irrational points that suggest that existence is not "off the rack" and that the sneaky hand of absurdity is behind everything.
Como
I have to admit that I just accept that approximations for π are
π = 22/7 or 3 • 14.
There is a danger of wasting time otherwise.
Paul
Pi is just a way of writing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter of a circle.
It's just a property of a circle that if you divide the circumference of a circle by its own diameter the ratio never changes. That ratio can't be expressed as a decimal number so we assign the Greek letter "p" to it. The Greek letter p (p for perimeter I guess) is written π.
5700
if the diameter of a circle is 1 then the circumference will be 3.14...
the circumeference is 3.14... the amount of the diameter