William wrote:Is there a sentence to remember the value of the square root of three.
I was told
I wish I knew
the root of two
At first I thought that was telling me the answer is 1.4143423, which is clearly wrong, since the value to four decimal places is 1.4142. I can see now that we aren’t supposed to count the letters in “the root of two”!
William wrote:and I read of
Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
That’s the first line of a mnemonic in verse. On its own it only gives the value of pi to five decimal places, which is hardly worth it given all the letter-counting you have to do. The comma for the decimal point is a nice touch, but I’d rather just remember 3.14159.
The full version of the verse, yielding twenty decimal places, is as follows:
Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force and magic spelling
Celestial sprites elucidate
All my own striving can’t relate
“Welcome to the present moment. Here. Now. The only moment there ever is.”
― Eckhart Tolle