[BITList] Oriental Jones and the pie

[John Feltham]

 From another List......



Begin forwarded message:


Dear Listers,

xxxxx's interesting and long extract about William Jones, the famous  
Sanskrit
scholar, contains, hidden in its length, an very interesting piece of
trivia, to which everyone can relate.  I specially bring it out here  
lest it
be altogether missed!

It is mentioned in that extract that Jones’s father, another William,  
was a
Welsh mathematics tutor. One of his jobs was to teach the mathematics of
navigation on board a British man-of-war. He wrote a text on the  
subject and
later a sort of general mathematics primer.  In it he introduced the
notation “pi” for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a
circle. It has been with us ever since.

I tried to check this from Google and got several hits supporting this
story.  As an example, please see  http://ualr.edu/lasmoller/pi.html  
which
observes that the symbol for pi was introduced by the English  
mathematician
William Jones in 1706, who wrote: 3.14159 = pi (the Greek letter).  This
symbol was adopted by Euler, one of the most famous names in  
Mathematics, in
1737 and became the standard symbol for pi.

The site http://numbers.computation.free.fr/Constants/Pi/pi.html  also  
says
the same and provides some more details.  It says that the first use  
of the
symbol ‘pi’ to represent the ratio of the circumference to the  
diameter is
given in Synopsis Palmariorum Mathseos by the Welsh mathematician  
William
Jones (1675-1749) in 1706. It was probably inspired by the Greek word  
for
circumference: peripheria. Later and progressively, this notation was
popularized in his publications by the Swiss Leonhard Euler (1707-1783).

A further interesting twist is that the proto-Indo-European language,  
which
concept originated from William Jones, is also called in short as  
PIE.  Thus
both father and son had something to do with 'pie', beyond the obvious  
one
that they must have eaten pies!

Toronto, March 25, 2009.





ooroo

Bad typists of the word, untie.