They may hate math, but lawyers can learn a lot from pi
How many digits of pi are there? A lot. How many should you use in any given calculation? That’s a different question.
When I was in law school, I had a professor who noted that judges sometimes appreciate being able to decide a case based on the application of a simple formula. When determining whether someone filed paperwork within a required deadline or adding up tax liabilities, finding the right answer is straightforward. That easy answer is a sharp (and appealing) contrast to many other areas of law, where the preliminary answer to most questions is usually “it depends.”
Many people choose to go to law school specifically to avoid doing math, but these lawyers (and other math-phobes) should find much to appreciate in the mathematical approach to the world. Mathematicians have refined many principles to their theoretical perfection. Real-world scenarios often approach, but do not perfectly line up with, these idealized theoretical concepts. But even when they are not able to provide the exact right answer, they can help us think more intelligently and comprehensively. Which brings me to pi. At some point, math becomes less about numbers and more about relationships. For me, one of the first hints of this — before variables and complex polynomials — was learning about pi, somewhere around middle school. That little Greek character helped us to find a circle’s area from its diameter and the volume and surface area of a sphere. With pi, we could find the right sized square peg for a round hole.
As pi came to figure more in my math studies, it became more than a number we needed for our calculations. Pi became our go-to example when discussing irrational numbers, with its long trail of never-repeating digits after the decimal. After you start out with 3.14, there are a lot more (not that it made the occasional show of memorization any less impressive). I enjoyed the puns as much as anyone — such eating pie on March 14 (3/14).
But beyond transforming distances to areas and volumes, another lesson I took away from pi was to learn how much was close enough, and what was clearly excessive. Four or five decimal places is fine for most classroom purposes, and at some point the additional digits become surplusage even when you are working with a circle the size of the galaxy. Even when more digits stretch on into any horizon, it’s wise to know when those become more of a burden than useful.
It’s the difference between one person’s criminal trial and the foundation for mass incarceration, or one person’s cold and public health.
The label as an irrational number suggests a lesson as well: We who call ourselves rational should know when enough is enough. Attempting to document pi to the last decimal may be a worthy quest, but a similar pursuit of the last word in any argument is an unhealthy tendency. Excess and the desire to outdo characterize and cause many troubling aspects of modern American life — think income inequality, suburban sprawl and environmental degradation. Pi gets rounded off at a reasonable number of digits not because the other digits are unknowable or unattainable but because of growing costs to using the excessively precise values.
As for how many digits of pi I use in a calculation?
It depends.
The label as an irrational number suggests a lesson as well: We who call ourselves rational should know when enough is enough. … Excess and the desire to outdo characterize and cause many troubling aspects of modern American life.