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  1. Simple as Pi

    Episode two of Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Most people’s first slice of Pi is at school where it is generally made palatable as either 3.14 or the fraction 3 1/7. The memory of this number may be fuzzy for those propelled through their Maths GCSE by the power of Casio (where Pi was reduced to a button on the bottom row of the calculator), but the likelihood is they still recall that romanticised notion of a number whose decimal places randomly go on forever. At its simplest, Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. At its most complex, it is an irrational number that cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers and has an apparently random decimal string of infinite length.

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    —Huffduffed by djextracrispy one year ago

  2. 6 Degrees of Separation

    Episode three of A Further Five Numbers, the BBC radio series presented by Simon Singh.

    Six is often treated as 2x3, but has many characteristics of its own. Six is also the "pivot" of its divisors (1 2 3=6=1x2x3) and also the centre of the first five even numbers: 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Six seems to have a pivoting action both mathematically and socially. How is it that everyone in the world can be linked through just six social ties? As Simon discovers, the concept of “six degrees of separation” emerged from a huge postal experiment conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967. Milgram asked volunteers to send a package by mail to one of a hundred people chosen at random. But they could only send mail to people they knew on first name terms.

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    —Huffduffed by djextracrispy one year ago