BENGALURU: Everyone has studied the irrational number π (pi) in school and wondered what is its use in modern day life. Researchers and experts have found the solution to it. Physicists from the Centre for High Energy Physics (CHEP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), have found that the pure mathematical equation used to calculate the value of pi, 100 years ago, has a connection to modern physics even today, showing up in theoretical models of percolation, turbulence and even some aspects of the study of the black hole in space.
The study, titled ‘Ramanujan’s 1/π (pi) Series and Conformal Field Theories’, was also published in the Physical Review Journals, Physical Review Letters on December 2, 2025.
They looked for a physics-based answer. “We wanted to see whether the starting point of the formulae, created by noted Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, fit naturally into some physics.
In other words, is there a physical world where Ramanujan’s mathematics appears on its own? Now scientists have computed pi up to 200 trillion digits using an algorithm called the Chudnovsky algorithm,” said Aninda Sinha, Professor at CHEP and author of the study.
In 1914, Ramanujan had published a paper listing 17 mathematical formulae to calculate pi. The formulae were so foundational that they formed the basis for modern computational and mathematical techniques – even the ones used by supercomputers – to compute digits of pi, stated the report.
The physicists found that Ramanujan’s formulae naturally come up within a broad class of theories called conformal field theories. These are the theories that describe systems with scale invariance symmetry – essentially systems that look identical no matter how deep you zoom in, like fractals.
They also found that it also comes up in logarithmic conformal field theories of mathematics. Using this connection, certain quantities and phenomena like turbulence or percolation can be efficiently understood better.