I teach Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to people of all ages, from preschoolers to middle-aged parents. While BJJ, in itself, is not necessarily the most academic of pursuits, I also happen to be a huge nerd. So while teaching some of my 8 to 13 year-old students, it sometimes happens that I overhear them talking about their math classes, often to complain about ideas that they’re struggling to grasp. Being a huge nerd, and also a delighted teacher, I do my best to help them through these issues. If I can teach a kid how to find the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle at the same time as teaching her how to finish a Triangle Choke, I become pretty much the proudest martial arts instructor you could hope to meet.
One of the things that my kids often use in their math classes, but almost never really understand, is the constant π (pi). They are taught π in class to help learn things like how to calculate the area of a circle, but they usually don’t really know what π actually is. They just think of it as some number that they have to memorize, never thinking about where the number comes from, or why it is what it is. Sometimes, I’ll tell the kids that they can earn their way out of doing push-ups if anyone can tell me what π is. Most often– after the jokes about desserts are made– I’ll hear someone say, “Coach, π is three-point-one-four!” Every now and again, one of the kids is clever enough to say, “Coach, π is three-point-one-four-on-into-infinity!” They get confused when I tell them that’s the value of π, but that is not what π actually is. It’s not their fault that they get confused by this; they were usually taught about π all wrong. I don’t even blame their math teachers, because most of the time, those math teachers were also taught about π in the wrong way. For a very long time, math classes have been teaching that π is a number, instead of teaching that π is the relationship between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. There is a reason it has been taught this way.
Ladies and gentlemen, π is just plain stupid.
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Posted in
Mathematics and tagged
Archimedes,
area of a circle,
Bob Palais,
circles,
circumference,
diameter,
mathematics,
Michael Hartl,
pi,
pi is wrong,
radius,
tau,
Tau Manifesto
Boxing Pythagoras 