## Can you copyright a number?

4/3/2011

You may have noticed that the link to the musical interpretation of pi I shared on Pi Day (3/14) is broken.  This is because someone else had already written a composition using the first digits of pi and copyrighted that composition.

Now, if Michael Blake, who created the composition Itried to share, had used the exact same rhythm as the previous composition (which I doubt), I would understand the copyright claim.  But pi is a number--how can it not be in the public domain?  Well, we can still write the first digits of pi, and we can say them, but if you want to use them to create a song by numbering the notes of the scale, you can't.  It's copyrighted.

## Happy Pi Day!

3/14/2011

Pi is the Greek letter we use to represent the number most often approximated as 3.14 (which is why March 14 is Pi Day).  Pi is one of those pesky irrational numbers.  It's an important one because it's the number that describes the relationship between a circle's diameter (the distance across the circle) and its circumference (the distance around the circle). Specifically, pi = circumference/diameter.

For a long time, we thought a circle's circumference was simply 3 times its diameter, but as we started to be able to draw more accurately, we started to notice that 3 wasn't quite right...

Mathematicians tried to figure out what the number actually was. Archimedes famously approximated pi by drawing regular 96-gons (polygons with 96 sides) inside and outside of a circle to get as close as possible to the actual measure of the circumference of the circle.  He figured out that pi is between 223/71 and 22/7.

Since pi is irrational, it can't be written as a fraction, and its decimal form goes on forever without repeating.  We're still finding digits to pi--and we always will be!

Here's a musical interpretation of pi to celebrate pi day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOjsRyxL7Rs.  Amazingly, it sounds pretty good!

## Author

Kelly Patton has somehow completed 20 years of formal mathematical education with her love of math intact.  She wishes every person were so lucky, so that's why she wrote this blog. Her current work can be found on Groennfell Meadery's website