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To: justshutupandtakeit; discostu
So, you are over here doing what you are best at; creating and spreading misinformation.

"The Egyptians didn't have a ball point pen handy so they created the Pyramid to calculate pi with."

So they spent 20 or thirty years building it? Don't you think that they could have devised a simpler means?

Actually all of this nonsense about the ratio of the height of the pyramid to the perimeter of the base being twice pi is easily dispensed with by anyone with the least familiarity with the classics. And I am amazed that you, given the intimate knowledge of classical Greek that you have claimed on another thread, would not be aware of this.

Get out your Herodotus (in the original Greek, the relevent passage is consistently mistranslated into English). Look at Book II, #124, in which Herodotus gives the dimensions of Cheops' pyramid and the design principles that led to the relations between its dimensions. He says that he was told that the dimensions were chosen so that the area of a triangular face of the pyramid would be equal to the square of the height of the pyramid. With a little elementary geometry and algebra you easily find that this yields the ratio that is found of the height to the perimeter of the base, i.e., about 6.28. That that number coincides with twice pi is pure coincidence.

157 posted on 09/24/2002 10:09:56 PM PDT by Aurelius
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To: Aurelius
I was joking about the pen as anyone with a sense of humour would have recognized.

Even the Herodotarian description is amazing and indicative of the incredible advancement of Eygptian mathematics. So you admit my contention is correct but it is only a "coincidence" oh, o.k. Funny that none of the other pyramids have this "coincidence" built into them or is that prood that it is a coincidence? Could it be that the relationship of the pyramid face and the height is a result of pi rather than the other way around?

I do not claim a knowledge of classic Greek nor even modern Greek. I wish I could.
161 posted on 09/25/2002 8:27:27 AM PDT by justshutupandtakeit
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