The Mathematical Ninja and the *Other* Pole
“Sensei, why have you covered the entire Earth in an area-preserving wrap?”
“It’s all @colinthemathmo’s doing.”
“I’m surprised you’re doing it in hardware rather than working it out in your head.”
“Oh, $\frac{1000}{\sqrt{\pi}}$? That’s trivial.”
“But of course it is.”
“I mean, $\frac{1}{\pi}$ is pretty close to $\frac{1}{\sqrt{10}}$, which is 0.316. In fact, since The difference between $\pi$ and $\sqrt{10}$ is about two-thirds of a percent, so $\frac{1}{\pi}$ is 0.318.”
“But we wanted the square root.”
“I’m getting to that. The square root of 3,180 is… forgive me, this pole is heavy - $56^2 = 3136$, add on $\frac{44}{112}$, which is about 0.4, to get 56.4. This pole is 564 metres tall.”
“Thanks for clearing that up, sensei.”
* Corrected 2019-10-20. Thanks to @peterrowlett for pointing out that I’d mis-transcribed the Ninja’s LaTeX.