Monday 3 May 2010

Did you think you knew π?


The document is the kind of thing you receive regularly when you are a scientist. I guess I commented briefly a long time ago about similar papers proving that relativity was wrong and that the author would have a better theory which unfortunately he/she could not express mathematically yet...

I obviously cut the name of the author of the paper at your left as I am a nice person.

Actually, I was very surprised about the paper. I knew that a lot of people have personal problems with relativity and quantum mechanics, many even with evolution, but I have never thought that people were thinking about π as a problem to be solved. The interesting conclusion of the author is that his "exact value" for Pi is finite. What exactly he means by finite I have no idea whatsoever. Well, he said it is not transcendental but I cannot understand the unhappiness of the author with transcendental numbers as their only fault is not to be the solution of any polynomial equation with rational coefficients, which is not such a general structure after all. Actually, you can find even in the Wikipedia article I linked to that the proof of π's transcendentality is given by a corollary of the Lindemann-Weierstrass Theorem, which shows that the guy did not even bother, during his 36 years of work on π, to look at the Internet to check his arguments.


Did you have already a similar paper in your hands?

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