Page 246 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

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CHAPTER 16 SPECIAL LETTERS IN THE BIBLE
CHAPTER 16 SPECIAL LETTERS IN THE BIBLE 225
committing suicide. This brought down the number of men hanged to exactly
ten, in the year 1946, Hebrew date “ז”שת”.

16.3 The Case of Pi (π)

The “pi coincidence” concerns the value of pi (π) as it may possibly be implied in
the Bible. It was discovered by the eighteenth-century East European rabbi “the
Gaon of Vilna” (1720–97).
The number π is a well known universal constant with the value:

π = 3.14159265358979323846 …

Traditionally, this number is used to express the (constant) ratio of the circum-
ference of a circle to its diameter. This number, however, also appears as a constant
in formulae of various unrelated branches of science and engineering, where it has
no geometrical meaning. Notable examples are the mathematical equation for the
density function of the normal distribution (in statistics), or Einstein s general-
’

relativity field equation.

The number pi was shown to be irrational (not capable of being expressed as a
ratio) in 1761 by Johann Heinrich Lambert, and a stronger proof was provided in
1794 by A. M. Legendre (Blatner 1998).

An algebraic equation is defined as a polynomial with a finite number of terms,

all having rational-number coefficients. A transcendental number is one that

cannot be the solution to an algebraic equation. Pi is a transcendental number, as

proved by Ferdinand von Lindemann in 1882 (Blatner 1998).

In a decimal form, the number pi forms an infinite series of digits after the

decimal point, and no cyclic pattern of any sort has so far been detected in this
series, nor any other form of regularity. In fact, increasing the number of known
digits after the decimal point has been a constant challenge for many centuries,
and modern-day computers even exacerbated that challenge in accelerating the
competition to calculate ever larger number of digits. The latter, calculated for pi
by modern-day computers, is now of the order of magnitude of many hundreds
of millions.
At least two books (Beckmann 1971, Blatner 1998) had been published about

pi, and there is a host of Internet sites about the number—some of them quite
entertaining (for example, http://www.joyofpi.com/pilinks.html).
These sources testify to the vast interest in π, in its mysterious properties—and

in how it enters, sometimes unexpectedly, into formulae of various scientific disci-
plines, detached altogether from its original geometrical meaning.