Yes, I really am a math geek

Today I was talking to one of our faculty members about websites and e-mail lists when he mentioned a really cool approximation of pi he had run into. You take 1234 and transpose the digits to get the prime number 2143, then you divide that by 22, and then take the 4th root of that value:

(2143/22)^(1/4)

and you come up with a number incredibly close to pi. This was actually figured out many years ago by Srinivasa Ramanujan, but it is still pretty amazing, and much closer to pi than 22/7 by quite a margin. In fact is is accurate out to 8 digits. Ramanujan actually came up with a whole bunch of approximations of pi you can find here at this Wolfram site (the makers of Mathematica). Neat stuff, isn't it?

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