Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 7.8% (55 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0.7% (5 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 9.3% (66 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 5.5% (39 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 1.7% (12 hits)
• Framing Effect - 4.4% (31 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 2.1% (15 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 10.9% (77 hits)
• Pessimism Bias - 0%

Article text

A New Formula for Pi Is Here.

And It’s Pushing Scientific Boundaries.

While building a simpler model for particle interactions, physicists found a new representation involving pi—not a new value for pi, and not a replacement for the one you learned in school.

Representations of pi help scientists use values close to real life without storing a million digits.

The making of the new pi involved using a series, which is a structured set of terms that either converge to one expression or diverge.

Physicists are now using principles from quantum mechanics to build a new pi.

Or, more accurately, they found a new way to make pi appear inside a hard piece of theoretical physics—one where particles scatter, equations branch, and the math can get ugly fast.

When Arnab Priya Saha and Aninda Sinha’s Physical Review Letters paper first dropped in 2024, it seemed like a number we all know and love had popped out of frontier physics.

But now, the “new pi” looks like one compelling piece of a larger project involving string-inspired dispersion relations, conformal field theory, and scattering amplitudes.

Scattering amplitudes are what physicists use to describe what can happen when particles interact.

Saha and Sinha’s paper looked for a cleaner way to organize those calculations while keeping the structure that matters.

The point is optimization—but not the everyday kind where you shave a few seconds off a commute.

In high-energy theory, a useful shortcut has to preserve the rules of the problem.

A neat-looking equation is no good if it gets the physics wrong.

As detailed in their paper, Saha and Sinha combined two existing ideas from math and science: the Feynman diagram of particle scattering and the Euler beta function for scattering in string theory.

What results is a series—something represented in math by the Greek letter Σ surrounded by parameters.

Series can end up generalizing into overall equations or expressions, but they don’t have to.

And while some series diverge—meaning that the terms continue to alternate away from each other—others converge on one approximate, concrete result.

That’s where pi comes in.

The digits of pi extend into infinity, and pi is itself an irrational number, meaning it can’t be truly represented by an integer fraction (the one we often learn in school, 22/7, is not very accurate by today’s standards).

But it can be represented pretty quickly and well by a series.

That’s because a series can continue to build out values well into the tiniest digits.

If a mathematician compiles a series’ terms, they can use the resulting abstraction to do math that isn’t possible with an approximation of pi that’s cut off at 10 digits by a standard desk calculator.

A sophisticated approximation enables the kind of nanoscopic particle work that inspired these scientists in the first place.

“In the early 1970s,” Sinha said in a statement from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), “scientists briefly examined this line of research, but quickly abandoned it since it was too complicated.”

But math analysis like this has come a long way since the 1970s.

In fact, not long after Saha and Sinha’s paper came out, Hjalmar Rosengren published a rigorous mathematical follow-up, “String theory amplitudes and partial fractions,” proving and generalizing expansions Saha and Sinha had found.

Then, in December 2025, Faizan Bhat and Sinha published a follow-up PRL paper connecting Ramanujan’s famous 1/π series to logarithmic conformal field theories.

IISc’s explanation pushed the reach wider, pointing to links with percolation, turbulence, black-hole-related models, and high-energy calculations that can become faster and more tractable.

In March 2026, Bhat, Saha, and Sinha published a study in Physical Review D, extending the same string-theory-motivated approach to higher-subtracted cases and deriving convergent series representations for the Veneziano and Virasoro-Shapiro amplitudes.

It’s admittedly dense stuff, but the point is simple enough: the “new pi” result now sits inside a framework that researchers are still expanding.

Will any of this become a standard working method outside a specialized corner of theory?

For now, no—but it sure is fun to geek out over.

“Doing this kind of work, although it may not see an immediate application in daily life, gives the pure pleasure of doing theory for the sake of doing it,” Sinha said in the statement.