Monte Carlo Pi

Pi

Thinking back to high school you may remember being taught about pi and using it in maths classes to calculate perimeters and areas of circles. You may remember being told a good approximation of pi is 3.14, or 22/7. But you may also recall that pi is irrational (meaning, in maths, that it cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers; basically, writing it out, it goes on forever; there are even books you can buy listing pi to a million decimal places).…

QED

QEDI work with a number of younger software engineers, so occasionally I’ll say something that demonstrates a sizeable generation gap. Usually it is because I’ve mentioned the lyrics of a song from the 80s, or some early 80s television show.

The other day I found myself more than a little surprised. I was explaining something to some of the boys, and at the end of my explanation I said, half in jest, “QED“.…