I’m a visual thinker. I need to see to be able to understand.
Mathematics is so based on faith. Someone says, “This axiom is true, so everything that follows is true. All you have to do is accept that and have faith.”
Well, that never worked for me growing up. I tried to work out some geometry in ways that satisfied me and this is how I understand Pi.
You may think it’s a crazy way of understanding it, but for many people this is a revelation.
We do not all think the same way or see the world in the same way.
I never understood Pi. I couldn’t make it work without knowing why Pi was 3.14 etc. No one ever wanted to tell me. Like so much of Math, You have to take numbers at face value and just accept – or believe that they are real and have a reason to be special.
When I began researching Archimedes for my little book about him, I finally understood where that number came from – how the radius relates to the circumference and therefor the area of a circle. Why had no one ever told me this? So much in math classes would have made sense.
Some of us are visual thinkers. We think in pictures and understand concepts visually. Mathematicians live in cities of glass and steel where all is pattern and puzzle. Pi does not belong to mathematics alone. Pi pervades art and philosophy too and so needs to be understood and appreciated in different ways.
Show the video above to non-mathematicians and watch them go – “Oh! right! That’s amazing… now it makes sense.”
S.T.E.M. is meaningless without art and culture.
Shoo Rayner – friend of Euclid and Archimedes
To celebrate Pi Day, buy a copy of my book, Archimedes, the Man who invented the Death Ray.
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