
The Sanskrit verse for the value of pi - monsterix
http://hindufocus.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/the-sanskrit-verse-for-the-value-of-pi/
======
jeswin
This is going to test HN's tolerance for myths and pseudo-science, but then
it's a Sunday. "It has a self-contained master-key for extending the
evaluation to any number of decimal places." is not going to convince many
people here.

There are many alternate views on the origin of this verse itself. The one I
find most believable, is that this is a fairly recent fabrication [1]. There
is nothing to suggest that we had this level of accuracy that far back. For
instance, how was this arrived at? Methods? None. But much later, _in the 5th
century AD_, Aryabatta used a simpler expansion for which we actually have
some evidence.

Just like most other religious texts, the Vedas don't stand up to modern
science and rigor. You'll see plenty of revivalist material on the web; many
here in India hold it in high regard. In my view, its lasting significance has
been the role in dividing India into castes. From the priests to the serfs, a
system that continues to hurt even today.

[1]: [http://vedicmathmyth.quora.com/The-misconceptions-of-the-
poe...](http://vedicmathmyth.quora.com/The-misconceptions-of-the-poem-gopi-
bhagya-madhuvrata)

~~~
droid5
/Just like most other religious texts, the Vedas don't stand up to modern
science and rigor/ \-- There is no such thing as modern science. Its the same
universe that existed billions of years ago and with our "thought process" we
are able to understand it better (compared to what was written in the past)
and are calling it modern now. Go forward 100 years and look back at current
science. What is it called as now ?

/dividing india into castes by religion/ \-- This is completely humans fault.
What Bhagavadgita explained were the variety of things people do to get
tired/frustrated in this place and get enlightened. Look at the meaning of
division without the caste mirror. You see the same set of things happening
everywhere in the world. a) People who are good at protecting others b) People
who are good at taking care of the mess created by others c) people who are
good at providing things to others c) People who are good at understanding
things and sharing the knowledge with society. At some point, this whole thing
got misunderstood, misinterpreted and exploited for ones selfishness. We are
paying the price now. But, the same things explained still holds true
everywhere in the world.

~~~
ibuildthings
> There is no such thing as modern science.

The way we approach and do science has evolved drastically (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method)
). For example empirical falsifiability which is one of the primary tenant of
modern science is less than 100 years old, but forms an essential part on how
we do science now a days.

Parent comment's point being; while we may be trying to understand the same
principle/phenomena, not only the data available to thinkers that time was
very sparse compared to the present; but also the level of rigour applied was
of significantly lower standards. While there might be scattered scientific
truth in the vedas ( or any other religious document) ; it is insolent to
believe that it is good reference manual for scientific knowledge.

~~~
droid5
As i see, the current science is more rigorous because people are producing
lot of crap. So, we made it to be like "if it can't be verified/repeatable its
not science". But do we really know for sure ? How many discoveries are being
overridden by new discoveries coming from future ?

The amount of data accessible to the people in the past is a lot more when
compared to current. Thats why there able to explain things that can't be
experienced by our senses. To share such things in the current time, the "can
be verified by our senses by a independent vendor ?" rule rejects. So, very
few people experience them and bring it down to such a level that every human
gets benefited from it.

The division between religion/science is very small, when both are approached
using similar thought-process. Its just that some rules reject others. As
human we need to approach and find truth for oneself without being biased.

~~~
ibuildthings
> As i see, the current science is more rigorous because people are producing
> lot of crap

Good, grief. No!!! It is a way of managing uncertainty and saying something
with a precision that is available at a given point of time.

> How many discoveries are being overridden by new discoveries coming from
> future ?

This is beauty/and USP of science. Every scientific proof is always open for
scrutiny and revision in light of new data or discovery ( tenants of
falsifiability kick in here). That is, it tries hard NOT to be dogmatic by
being provisional. For example, science says that we are confident Higgs Boson
exists "accounting for one-in-a-million chance on the contrary" ( 5-sigma).

Let me flip your argument on the converse; success rate at which we could make
ground breaking theories [ like evolution, theory of relativity , uncertainty
principle ] ( which is standing the test of time for extended period of time)
using the scientific method is sheer staggering and amazing. The methodology
has accelerated our progress and understanding by leaps and bounds which no
alternate system has managed to do so, so far!

> The amount of data accessible to the people in the past is a lot more when
> compared to current.

I lost you completely here. Can you please elaborate and the rest of the
paragraph. ( My belief: If you take 20 random guesses; one of them turned out
to be true; it is more likely to be a coincidence than a mystical insight. If
on the contrary, the Monte Carlo filter I routinely simulate might just be the
most insightfully entity I have encountered ).

> The division between religion/science is very small

Epistemologically they are apples and oranges! Falsifiability is not
applicable to religion nor is it is provisional and routinely advocates
absolute (and imho dogmatic) reasoning!

~~~
droid5
> science says that we are confident Higgs Boson exists ( 5-sigma).

Agreed, Science comes from our experience/understanding of things around us by
our senses. Try to explain the above Higgs Boson to a blind person who has
never seen anything in their life. As long as science explains stuff that can
be experienced by the senses, everybody else with similar senses get them.

> Epistemologically they are apples and oranges!

Its all in our thought process. Everything came from our
thinking/undertsanding of things around us. It just happened to be that we are
closer to prove somethings easily vs others.

> ... using the scientific method is sheer staggering and amazing > The amount
> of data accessible to the people in the past is a lot more when compared to
> current.

Appreciated the hardwork done by all these determined people. How did _only
few_ people have access to such knowledge ? In order to find the truth we
should not be biased. The reason why people in the older generations might not
have shared such knowledge is to prevent mis-use of it, for better of mankind.
While we take pride in such innovations.

~~~
waps
It vastly depends on the actual science which standard of proof is accepted.

For maths, with a 5-sigma result you can maybe get a mention in the "curiosa"
section if it's weird enough. It is certainly not considered a valid
mathematical result.

For biology, a 1 sigma result is considered pretty good. And due to
experimental restrictions, this is actually more strict than medicine
requires.

Many science disciplines work with known-wrong theories. Civil engineering for
example, works with pre-Newtonian mechanics (not even "turtle mechanics" : in
the best simulations a building stands on ground, which stands on a plate
which is magically suspended in a "downward" gravity field, not on a planet).

The idea of "this is the standard of proof for 'science'" is a nice one, but
it doesn't exist in any reasonable sense. Only the utilitarian definition
sticks : we have 100 standards of proof, and if the theory works (or gets
enough money if your cynical) we'll find the standard of proof that allows us
to call it science.

Furthermore, there are several inconsistencies in the science underpinning,
for example, the Higgs boson discovery. We do not actually have rigorous
proofs for constructing even natural numbers by the standards of first-order
logic. And second order logic has paradoxes that stand unresolved (there is a
lot of research to find something "more flexible" than first-order logic, but
stricter than second-order that works, but this research has been going on for
more than a century and there are no really good candidates, only really bad
ones like the famous failure of the Choice axiom)

The standard model doesn't even contain gravity, so if you're being pedantic
you could drop a pen from your desk and claim, correctly, that you've just
falsified the entire standard model, or at least proven it's incompleteness.

Less pedantically in the physics itself there is the massive open question.
The Higgs field only causes inertia, not gravity. Yet the measure of
interaction with the Higgs field of any object we've ever measured matches
exactly the value we've got for that same object's gravitic interactions. Does
anyone believe this to be a coincidence ? Major open hole there.

~~~
ibuildthings
Falsification and Incompleteness are two different things. Since we reason
about physicals system using the language of mathematics/logic; it has be
based on certain axiom which cannot be proved or disproved ( Godel's
incompleteness theorem ). Though this renders certain statements inside
physical theorem non-provable ; it certainly does translate to every claim
made by a proposed theory. Further many aspects of physicals systems can be
disproven experimentally. ( It is still in active debate if Mathematics should
treated as science per se :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_scie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_science)
)

While the pen falling from a desk do point out to the incompleteness ( non-
Godel sense) of the standard model, which is widely accepted (
[http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-
model](http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/standard-model) : last paragraph
), it does not falsify it. Science is full of open holes, and no one knows (
my bet is against) that it will be completely patched up; but it is the best
form of reasoning we have in understanding things, and its ongoing goal is to
seek explanations that with the least amount of uncertainty possible.

~~~
waps
I think we're largely making the same point : that science is largely based on
a utilitarian definition of truth. A somewhat more direct way to state that is
that scientific truth is simply

"What works for me"

And nothing more.

I do disagree on one point though. The standard model doesn't just "lack"
gravity. It describes a world without gravity. Therefore that gravity exists
must mean that the standard model is wrong. It describes a universe that is
most certainly not the one we live in. I therefore find it hard to describe
that theory as true. It is more akin to "currently the best-known least-wrong
theory". Even best-known has to be in there since, for example, relativity
theory was known long before Einstein got his ball rolling, and Newton's
equation was known before the apple fell. So we do likely know about better
theories than the standard model, we just currently have no way to distinguish
them from either the standard model, or (more likely) the better theories are
just failing to get enough attention from well-publicized physicists. Of
course, when you don't know exactly which theories are in fact better, their
existence doesn't matter.

------
roywiggins
Wikipedia is not infallible but it says Sanskrit sources had one or two digits
of pi: "In India around 600 BC, the Shulba Sutras (Sanskrit texts that are
rich in mathematical contents) treat π as (9785/5568)2 ≈ 3.088. In 150 BC, or
perhaps earlier, Indian sources treat π as sqrt(10) ≈ 3.1622."

Anyway, the source the linked article cites is

[http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/vedic-
mathematics.html](http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/vedic-
mathematics.html)

which notes

    
    
        It must be pointed out that these sutras given by Tirtha Maharaja are created by the author himself, as stated in the introduction to his book, "Vedic Mathematics" (published posthumously) and are therefore not actually Vedic.
        These mathematical sutras are Vedic only in the sense that they are inspired by the Vedas in the mind of one dedicated to the Vedas. Thus the title "Vedic Mathematics" is not correct.

------
sillysaurus2
I'm in a random mood, so here are random pi facts:

Inscribe a circle within a square. Choose random points within the square. As
the number of points approaches infinity, the number of points that fall
within the circle divided by the total number of points, times four, is pi.
[http://mathfaculty.fullerton.edu/mathews//n2003/montecarlopi...](http://mathfaculty.fullerton.edu/mathews//n2003/montecarlopimod.html)

Memorizing something like the first 8 digits of pi is enough to calculate the
circumference of the Earth to within a few inches, iirc. (My memory is bad, so
it's probably 8 +/\- 2 digits.)

The quadrillionth bit of pi is zero.
[http://www.daemonology.net/papers/](http://www.daemonology.net/papers/)

And keeping in spirit with the post, here's a pi chant:
[http://pi.ytmnd.com/](http://pi.ytmnd.com/)

~~~
hzay
I don't think you can calculate the circumference of the Earth to within a few
inches that easily because earth's topology isn't perfectly smooth. It has ups
and downs all over.

~~~
fizx
And is significantly bulgy around the equator due to rotation. Calling BS.

~~~
philhippus
Not BS, take the equator as the circumference and a weighted average between
sea level and the highest point on that line for the constant circular path
and you'll have a measurement relative to pi.

------
curiousDog
Noped out of that. Considering the recent string of these Nationalist, feel
Good posts, it's about time they're autobanned.

I'm Indian myself and I've done quite a bit of study on this topic.Vedic
mathematics is rooted in ignorance and a disregard for proofs. It's pretty
much a way for nationalists (which intensified after the british conquest) to
appease and make a billion people feel good about their history. In short,
it's pretty much bullshit. What Ramanujan did was math, not this hindutva
propaganda crap. Next thing you know, you'll start hearing about astrology and
how it's a Vedic science.

~~~
eklavya
I would like to know what you think about
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan)

Nearly all of his findings were without proof, so what are you trying to imply
here?

And about astrology, they did know about the Arundhati twin star system, so
they did know something. While you are at it, blow your minds and lookup the
fact that they gave a measurement of speed of light in Mahabharata.

It's not about nationalism. No offense, I don't know you but you kind of sound
like all those Indians who just have to look down on everything Indian.

~~~
curiousDog
I think we both understand where I was coming from with the Ramanujan thing.
Regarding the Mahabharata, same story. how did they find it out? Why wasn't
the methodology given with proof? Why didn't they put more effort into
understanding it's properties? Do you have a source to the exact line in the
early scripture? Otherwise, it just sounds like something that was slipped in
during the translation process.

None taken. Personally, I believe that if you're vehemently "proud" of your
country and heritage, you havent accomplished much else in life thus far. I
don't look down upon Indians, only worried that pseudoscience like this is a
dent to credibility and only belittles and overshawdows the great work that's
being done today/will be done in the future

~~~
eklavya
I think you do not understand why I mentioned Ramanujan. He said in his own
words that mathematical facts just came to him while dreaming from a god.
Since there is no methodology given for his findings he is a crook, right?

As for early scriptures, suppose after 5000 years if the current civilization
is no more and the future generations get hold of a book with no mathematical
proofs but astounding facts which clearly state the technological advancements
of our time, they should just call it "pseudoscience". Yeah, right.

Personally I believe that if somehow you are proud of only the things YOU have
done, you have got way too many problems of your own to take care of.

The fact that you couldn't google a simple fact says a lot about your
"achievements/accomplishments" too. Here you go
[http://alishekh.blogspot.in/2009/05/speed-of-light-in-rig-
ve...](http://alishekh.blogspot.in/2009/05/speed-of-light-in-rig-veda.html)

It's pretty simple Sanskrit, it's not even riddled, it's plain Sanskrit. If
you understand even a little Sanskrit (I do) the translation will make sense.
Of course you could trust the author of the article too for having done a good
job in translating and explaining. And just so you know that guy who has
written this seems to be a Muslim, so zero benefit in advancing the said
"propaganda".

~~~
ashayh
Wow your link looks extremely scientific and rigorously researched.

Just one of its more obvious gems:

2000 Dhanus = 1 Gavyúti (distance to which a cow’s call or lowing can be
heard) = 12000 feet

~~~
eklavya
<scrcasm>

2000 Dhanus = 1 Gavyuti hmmm, they must have first calculated a Gavyuti and
then just randomly equated it to 2000 dhanus. The fact that they named it
after a cow's call (range approximately 12000 feet) is the proof. People named
unit erlang after erlang, so <insert a bullshit correlation here>

</sarcasm>

------
negamax
As an Indian. I would request fellow Indians (who else is upvoting this?) to
not encourage such posts. There's enough superstition already in the country.
Let's not encourage it. Let people join and learn modern mathematics and
sciences and make them study ancient texts as leisure but let's not shout
there are hidden codes and blah in them.

------
intull
How can ka mean 1 or 0, ta mean 1 or 6, da mean 3 or 8, etc ?? Some sounds
have multiple numbers associated with it!

~~~
fnbr
I presume it's a tonal language (like, say, Chinese), where words have
different meanings depending on the gone that they are said in.

~~~
witty_username
No, it's just that there are different sounds that transcribe to the same
letter in English. (aspirated th versus th (th in thirst)).

------
kissickas
Doesn't this give the value of pi if you don't put the decimal point before
the first number? I mean you could say it represents pi*10^32, right?

Incidentally, I used the same technique to memorize some (fewer) digits pi in
English.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system)

~~~
waps
This looks like a hoax. If you look at the decoding ring, it's more complex
than the message is in the first place. There are even duplicates in their
decoder ring. Sa means 4 different numbers, and 7 duplicates in their decoder
ring. Using their decoder ring (using the first "meaning" of any number, I get
(text, value according to their decoding, value from pi approximation) :

    
    
        [('go', 3, 3),
        ('pi', 1, 1),
        ('bha', 4, 4),
        ('gya', 'UNKNOWN', 1),
        ('ma', 5, 5),
        ('dhu', 4, 9),
        ('vra', 'UNKNOWN', 2),
        ('ta', 1, 6),
        ('srngi', 'UNKNOWN', 5),
        ('so', 5, 3),
        ('da', 3, 5),
        ('dhi', 4, 9)]
    

It's close, sure. But not better than other random stuff.

In "lorem ipsum" text, translating a->1, b->2,... you find 3141(391491322514)
at position 170 onwards. And the collected works of william shakespeare (as
downloaded at
[http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100.txt](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100.txt))
contain the following "PI approximations" (encoded as above):

3 => 290159 occurences 31 => 116402 occurences 314 => 7913 occurences 3141 =>
3970 occurences 31415 => 1650 occurences 314159 => 39 occurences 3141592 => 8
occurences 31415926 => 0 occurences

Shakespeare must have been a closet mathematical genius ! (Hmmm, I guess he
lived after the discovery of Pi, ... oh well, still makes the point I guess)

Even the bible contains actual approximations to pi (for example the
surprisingly accurate 22/7). It even makes sense that it does. For a lot of
history the bible was effectively the only book available for a large
percentage of the population (and even then, often not directly). It seems the
authors knew that and included tons of relevant stuff. It contains
descriptions of how "large" buildings can be built (large by medieval
standards, of course). Including textual descriptions of plans for things like
churches. It contains details of how to make agriculture work, when to sow,
when to harvest, when to switch between grain and animals, when to ... to make
land productive. We still use the 7-year land rotation rule on today's farms.

Given that the bible clearly was meant to be a sort of "civilization in a
single (if massive) book", it makes sense that intuitive descriptions for pi
would be one of the things found in there. Perhaps the same is true for the
vedas ?

Maybe I'm putting the horse before the cart here. The situation could be
reversed as well. Assuming a religion gets of the ground at all, it's survival
depends on how well it's subjects do. So it's only natural that the religions
that grow huge in some way things like the (approximate) value of Pi, and
stuff like making agriculture work. And like in the real world you have
different flavors of survival. Building, breeding, growing and defense clearly
weighed heavily on the bible, vedas and buddhist texts (all of those books,
for example, heavily favor not counterattacking an enemy that comes and fights
for plunder, merely to let plunder run out and let the attacker starve),
whereas conquest, plundering and looting predominate, for example, the quran
or the original mongol religion (those religions focus on things like plunder,
remaining mobile (e.g. absurd punishments for doing things to horses), and
very strict rules about not directly attacking other religions (only their
power on the ground). They all have rules about recruiting new cannon fodder
(ie. promises of plunder for anyone who joins the religion, making it
everyone's duty to recruit new members, ...). Islam actually contains rules
that bear a resemblance to a multilevel marketing scheme. If you bring new
members, you get a share of their loot for a while). "Growing" religions are
vulnerable when they reach a large size, because at some point the borders
can't expand while the population keeps growing. "Attacking" religions have
the same problem any predator population does : they can only grow by
destroying other populations, never by themselves. They survive as tiny
inactive pockets, every now and then blowing up exponentially only to die off
just as fast soon after, leaving enormous devastation (to read about this in
nature, read about the history of wildlife management, or about what happened
in Australia, or for a less extreme example American national parks).

Maybe we should just look at religions as just another form of life. Not
"really" alive, but certainly making a huge difference in the world. (Yes,
I've read Jared Diamond's books).

If a religion did not imitate a real-world survival technique it simply
wouldn't survive. So there probably have been a lot of alternate versions,
just almost no surviving ones.

~~~
swatkat
Huh?! The "duplicates" in decoder ring you mentioned, are actually different
letters that differ in their sound. I commented about it elsewhere in this
page.

~~~
waps
Then please fix the transliteration and the ring. Isn't the whole point of
transliteration is that you can "accurately" reproduce the sound ?

"Sa" means 4 different numbers in order to make it work. That's not
reasonable.

Even if it does fit, it's still a hoax. Look how far shakespeare got. Do you
believe that he intentionally put 8 references to 7 digit approximations in
his texts ?

Without (at least) the inverse tangent expansion of pi, this number could not
have been constructed. Furthermore, if it came from divine inspiration,
there's a glaring omission : why doesn't it mention the irrational nature of
Pi ? Otherwise even a 100 digit approximation would lead any reasonable reader
to a wrong conclusion. In this case to nothing better than an Indian version
of this :
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill).

Every "real" mathematical book on Pi contains three proofs. First that it is
irrational (that you can only approximate Pi, it doesn't have any finite
representation), that some method of series expansion approximates Pi, and
that said series converges. Without these 3 bits of data you don't know what
Pi is. The actual value of Pi is almost inconsequential, and can be trivially
measured using a rope and a measuring stick by a first grader to an accuracy
of at least 10 digits. Alternatively you could calculate without an explicit
value, like the ancient Greeks did.

Furthermore there's nothing special about this. When it comes to written
references to the value of Pi, there are documents going back ~4000 years
(E.g. the Rhynd papyrus). If you accept buildings that could not have been
constructed without an approximation of Pi's value, then we can go back 6000
years before we really get into trouble. If you accept the reasoning that
pyramids which are the "internal" pyramid of a ball shape could not have been
a coincidence, knowledge of pi (which is necessary to construct such a shape)
goes back nearly 10000 years.

~~~
swatkat
I'm not the author of that blog, so can't fix it :) Here's the link that talks
about consonants:
[http://www.languagereef.com/consonanttable.php?lang=SANSKRIT](http://www.languagereef.com/consonanttable.php?lang=SANSKRIT)

Also, I don't have any comments about that Pi verse itself. From what I
gather, it's first occurrence was in a book from 1965. So, may be it's a
retro-logic based on Katapayadi system
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katapayadi_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katapayadi_system)).

------
unmole
A bit of background on the verse: [http://vedicmathmyth.quora.com/The-
misconceptions-of-the-poe...](http://vedicmathmyth.quora.com/The-
misconceptions-of-the-poem-gopi-bhagya-madhuvrata)

------
vog
I find the "real" pi poems more interesting, e.g.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology#German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology#German)

------
baby
so learn sanskrit first, learn their numeral equivalence, then you can learn
pi!

In all seriousness, I've always wondered how I could learn Pi. I've seen
people assimilating a word to each double digits. Then make a story out of
those words.

But first you'd have to learn exactly 100 associations.

Anyone knows of another technique ?

