Happy Pi Day to all the geeks and nerds of the world! (I know I am one day late). On March 15, 2015 at 9:26 and 53 seconds, an amazing thing happened: the digits of the time matched the first ten digits of pi. Every year on March 14 the mathematicians of the world unite to celebrate Pi Day but yesterday was of particular significance. Usually only three digits match, but once every century ten of them do. This once in a lifetime day led to much celebration for the nerds of the world. It's fun to celebrate such an important number and it is a good excuse to eat lots of pie. Yum! Pi is a particularly interesting and important number for many reasons. I will not go into the intricacies of the number but if you are interested
click here. If you are like me and you have a vast collection of nerdy math and science shirts then you probably will want one in commemoration of Pi Day too. I got mine
here and had lots of fun explaining it to people throughout the day.
Here are some of my favorite facts about pi and Pi Day:
1. There is a
Star Trek episode where Spock outsmarts the computer by asking it to compute the last digit of pi (It's called Wolf in the Fold if you want to watch it).
2. Because pi is an irrational number and we will never know the last digit of it, we can never truly calculate the circumference of a circle.
3. The Great Pyramid of Giza seems to approximate pi. The vertical height of the pyramid has the same relationship to the base that the radius of a circle has to the circumference.
4. Pi has been studied by humans since 2000 BC when the Babylonians came close with an approximation of 3.125.
5. It's Albert Einstein's birthday!
Einstein was born on March 14, 1879. The fact that that the person with one of the most irrational, yet brilliant, minds was born on Pi Day seems awfully fitting to me.
Once again, happy Pi Day!
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