Andrea Marie on the Columbia River (don't tell her I stopped paddling).

The snow was mostly good at home... except for this one section I had to stop and walk across!

I should have posted these pictures when I was talking about Wenatchee but, um, I forgot they were on my camera. So now they get to share a post with the lovely Pi! Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter as most people know but what most people don't think about when they think about 3.14159... is that Pi provides a great vantage point to the history of mankind.

The concept of pi existed long before people knew it with even a few digits of accuracy and before modern notation could be used to express it. The problem of "squaring the circle" was one of the first mathematical problems mankind tackled and came up after agriculture kicked in and people started constructing permanent dwellings. An understanding of Pi is a fair way to judge the development of a civilization. A long, long time ago the Babylonians (3 1/8 or 3.125) and the Egyptians ((16/9)^2 or 3.16) had the best approximations for Pi but the Chinese and the Hebrews were also aware of pi and estimating it with 3. Speaking of the Hebrews way back when, I'd like to point out to anyone who things the bible is Truth that our good friend Solomon would have needed almost 31 and a half cubits around his bathhouse, whatever a cubit is, 30 just would not have cut it: And he made the molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and the height thereof was five cubits; and a line of thirty cubits compassed it round about, I Kings vii 23.

Once the Romans swept in (around 200BC), developments in Pi came to a grinding halt in that part of the world and the leaders in mathematical thought were the Mayan, the Chinese and the Hindu civilizations. It wasn't until the 1500's that Europe caught back up with the rest of the world.

Labels: math, photos