My nemesis was pi

When I started thinking about how dishonest I had been during the first two years of my engineering education my mind went reminiscing about how I cooked my physics lab reports. I was not the best cook but fortunately I was good enough, and fast too, not to get caught. Thinking back I blame it on a congruence of a few things.

I did not have an electronic calculator and you must remember this was in early 1970s. Indeed, even a slide rule was out of reach for me. I used Clark’s Tables for carrying out multiplications and divisions. Crucially, I was careless while calculating and the irony of it was I was studying to become an engineer, the profession underpinned by calculations, calculations and more calculations. I was singularly unsuited to be an engineer. But I am jumping the gun and let me get back to my escapades in the physics labs.

pi is a good number. It is powerful and irrational, a deadly combination. There are not many calculations in physics that do not have the pi. We approximated it to 22/7 (that is not July 22nd!), with an error of no more than 0.04%. But add my carelessness, the error balloons!
I will the do the experiments most diligently and record the observations equally well. But, while using the logarithmic tables, I will take the logarithm off 22 but forget that of the seven or vice versa. That is, I will multiply or divide by 22 as appropriate but forget to carry out the corresponding operation on seven, or vice versa. And my calculated results from verifiable data will be off by factors of, you guessed it, 22 or seven or some combination of these! And, my cooking will start and I was good at it, in principle.

But there were further problems. I will make similar mistakes while cooking also and I could not have made head or tail out of what I would have come up with. Then, I will start working out slowly and locate the mistake, invariably in accounting for the pi. You see, before we leave the laboratory we had to get the observational data attested to by the supervisor. I was one of the fastest in doing the experiments but I will invariably leave the lab the last. All the while I was cooking, forward, reverse, inverse, what not.

There is no exaggeration in what I wrote above. And, I cannot recall how I managed the same experiments in the lab exams. I scored consistently high. God (I was a believer then) should have guided me through those calculations!

Fortunately, by the time I reached the third year when we started lab classes in the civil engineering department, I had got a slide rule. The first thing I did after purchasing it was to kiss the engraved mark pi. I had finally beaten my nemesis. And, I have been an engineer ever since!

Raghuram Ekambaram