Can multiple recitations of the many digits of a mathematical constant be fun and entertaining? Yes!
Librivox volunteers recorded Pi to the 50th digit for Pi Day one year. Here’s the number:
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
Some of these recordings are very creative. The musical ones show how music can be made out of anything! You can hear Pi recited like a Klingon, in French, Hungarian and Latin, in Pig Latin, very quickly, by kids, adults, while laughing, and the list goes on.
I’ll start with the recordings that are musical.
Hear Pi to the 50th digit…
Sung Like a Lullaby
Sung in Welsh
Sung like the Battle Hymn of the Republic
Sung like I’m a Modern Major General
Here’s an instrumental one.
The photo below is of a Chinese zither. I believe the musician gave each string a number (starting with the first string) – to create a melody of the numbers of Pi to the 50th digit.
Here’s a recording by a 1ist grade class.
Pig Latin.
Quickly in English.
In other languages.
Pi to the 50th digit Recited in Chinese
Recited in French
Recited in Hungarian
Recited in Latin
Recited in Hebrew
Recited in Esperanto
Here are 2 for us geeks who like Star Trek:
Recited like the "Captain’s Log"
Recited in Klingon
Finally some that are even sillier:
Recited like Pilots Landing a Plane
There are a few more at the Librivox link above.
Enjoy Pi, guy!
Mama Lisa
Image at the top created by Mama Lisa.
This article was posted on Saturday, April 17th, 2010 at 8:37 pm and is filed under English, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Holidays Around the World, Hungarian, Languages, Math, Pi, Pi Day, Pi Day, Teaching, Welsh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
April 19th, 2010 at 9:35 am
I’m glad we didn’t have to know all these for our maths classes! We used it as 3,14 said trois / quatorze = three / fourteen, or 3,1416 said “trois / quatorze cent seize” = three / fourteen hundred and sixteen. As you can notice the French use a comma instead of a dot in figures and would use a dot where the English speaking people use a comma. Now we leave a space instead. When saying “1416” we say it as we would a date, i.e. using “14 hundred…” instead of “1 thousand 4 hundred…” as we would a regular figure.
April 19th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Here you can watch a video class/lecture shot in the Pi Room in the Palais de la Découverte in Paris. Sure the 30min video is in French, but you’ll see the room with the first 704 decimals. Besides, they say that there are at least 1,400 billion (yes!) digits after 3. There is no real use to this, but just the fact that “we did it”!