2011-07-02
“Not even numbers”
Dealtalk: Google bid “pi” for Nortel patents and lost (via):
“Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said.
“It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,” the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.
Well.
Firstly, of course they’re numbers. They might not be round numbers (by which, more specifically, I mean numbers with only one or two significant digits), but they are certainly numbers. Does “the source” also believe that humans should only communicate with the simplest of business jargon, because words are too confusing?
After all, comparing $3 with $3.14 is no harder than comparing $4 and $5, unless you’re in the early days of school.
Secondly, wasn’t their bid not pi, but π×10⁹? More accurately, π×10⁹ to either nine or eleven significant digits? (I suspect the former, since the other numbers listed are integer dollar amounts.)
Historical footnote: π wasn’t calculated to eleven significant digits until as late as 1400, by Mādhava of Sañgamāgrama, an Indian mathematician.
