Bad_Mojo posted... Okay, thanks, everyone
Now explain calculus to me, please
I made this topic thinking about the Zeno Paradox [How can you make it anywhere if you keep halving the distance] and found out that's why calculus was made, so solve that question. And they did it
Could anyone shed some light on this to a big dummy like me?
It's because some infinite sums of numbers can actually converge to a finite number. The series 1/2 + 1/4 +1/8 +1/16 + .... Converges to 1, which is the crux of the Zeno Paradox.
It took mathematicians more than a century even after Isaac Newton and Leibniz invented calculus to truly work out some of the complexities of infinite sums. They are really tricky to use if you don't know what you are doing. For instance, if you have a series that doesn't converge absolutely and you try to rearrange the terms you can end up with totally arbitrary results like 0=1. A mathematician famously did that and thought he had a mathematical proof for the existence of god.
Bad_Mojo posted... Then why isn't it just 3.14? Why all the other numbers?
Like someone already said, it's an irrational number and thus has infinite digits. It would be really inconvenient to have to write out all those digits especially considering how ubiquitous it is in math, physics and engineering. That's why it's represented by the greek letter pi. It's simply the ratio of the circumference of any given circle over its diameter.
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