Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads,” Olivia Laing wrote in her stunning meditation on life, loss, and the meaning of rivers. “There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today. ” But this chaotic, civilization-strewing mystery may be underpinned by one of the most elemental mathematical truths of nature.
In her splendid ode to pi, the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska extolled it as “the admirable number… nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity to continue.” On the second day of spring in 1996, the Cambridge University earth scientist Hans-Henrik Stølum published a paper announcing his astonishing finding that pi is also nudging, always nudging, the bendy paths of the world’s rivers to continue their seemingly chaotic meanderings — in a mathematically predictable pattern. His simulation, using empirical data and fluid dynamics modeling, found that the oscillating paths of rivers — their sinuosity, calculated by dividing the river’s actual meandering length by the length of the direct line drawn from source to sea — average 3.14.
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