Happy Pi Day!
Indeed, today is 3.14 (or 14.3 for you non-Yanks, but then if you're gonnna be that way you'll miss out on all the fun) and not only that, but it's pi's 300th anniversary, and baby has it come a looooong way (in 1807 William Shanks took nearly 15 years to calculate 707 digits of pi; in 1997 Kanada, Takahashi, and Hitachi computed 51,539,600,000 in under 30 hours -- that's about 0.000002 seconds each!).
I encourage everyone to indulge (or discover) their inner numbers geek today, and take an extra minute of reflection at 1:59 (cookie to anyone who knows the appropriate seconds count off the top of their head) today for pi. If you've got more than a minute, do check out the scarily obsessive pi page by Eve Andersson and a fair bunch of other pi resources. Without which I could not have discovered the following gems:
What is pi?
Mathematician: Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Engineer: Pi is about 22/7.
Physicist: Pi is 3.14159 plus or minus 0.000005
Computer Programmer: Pi is 3.141592653589 in double precision.
Nutritionist: You one track math-minded fellows, it's a healthy and delicious dessert!
Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o-lantern by its diameter?
A: Pumpkin pi.
Q: What do you get when you take a bovine and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Cow pi.
Q: What do you get when you take green cheese and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Moon pi.
Q:What do you get when you take a native Alaskan and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Eskimo pi.
Q:What do you get when you take the sun and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Pi in the sky.
Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a bowl of ice cream by its diameter?
A: Pi a'la mode.
Why is pi better than e? Because pi is the bigger piece of pie.
Pi: A number, represented by said letter, expressing the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of pi has been calculated to many millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not smooth. Nature
herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when they get sufficiently small, as Prof. Heisenberg has pointed out. However, the continued extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.
If you go and search the records of the Indiana House of Representatives, what you will find is that there was a bill passed that related to pi, House Bill No. 246 to be precise. What this 1897 bill did was offer the State of Indiana an angle trisection, a cube duplication, and a circle quadrature. Obviously, a misguided amateur mathematician had managed to persuade a legislator that he had something of value to offer.
Though it passed in the House, the bill had less success when it went to the State Senate. Admittedly it is unlikely that any of the good senators of Indiana was able to evaluate the claims made in the bill, but they nevertheless had the good sense to consider it not a proper matter for the law. They postponed any action on the matter, and so it has remained ever since.
The full Indiana pi story (yes, there's more to it) is recounted by Underwood Dudley in his excellent book Mathematical Cranks, published by the MAA in 1992.
You never can know too much about pi, after all ...
I encourage everyone to indulge (or discover) their inner numbers geek today, and take an extra minute of reflection at 1:59 (cookie to anyone who knows the appropriate seconds count off the top of their head) today for pi. If you've got more than a minute, do check out the scarily obsessive pi page by Eve Andersson and a fair bunch of other pi resources. Without which I could not have discovered the following gems:
What is pi?
Mathematician: Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Engineer: Pi is about 22/7.
Physicist: Pi is 3.14159 plus or minus 0.000005
Computer Programmer: Pi is 3.141592653589 in double precision.
Nutritionist: You one track math-minded fellows, it's a healthy and delicious dessert!
Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o-lantern by its diameter?
A: Pumpkin pi.
Q: What do you get when you take a bovine and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Cow pi.
Q: What do you get when you take green cheese and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Moon pi.
Q:What do you get when you take a native Alaskan and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Eskimo pi.
Q:What do you get when you take the sun and divide its circumference by its diameter?
A: Pi in the sky.
Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a bowl of ice cream by its diameter?
A: Pi a'la mode.
Why is pi better than e? Because pi is the bigger piece of pie.
Pi: A number, represented by said letter, expressing the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of pi has been calculated to many millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not smooth. Nature
herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when they get sufficiently small, as Prof. Heisenberg has pointed out. However, the continued extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.
If you go and search the records of the Indiana House of Representatives, what you will find is that there was a bill passed that related to pi, House Bill No. 246 to be precise. What this 1897 bill did was offer the State of Indiana an angle trisection, a cube duplication, and a circle quadrature. Obviously, a misguided amateur mathematician had managed to persuade a legislator that he had something of value to offer.
Though it passed in the House, the bill had less success when it went to the State Senate. Admittedly it is unlikely that any of the good senators of Indiana was able to evaluate the claims made in the bill, but they nevertheless had the good sense to consider it not a proper matter for the law. They postponed any action on the matter, and so it has remained ever since.
The full Indiana pi story (yes, there's more to it) is recounted by Underwood Dudley in his excellent book Mathematical Cranks, published by the MAA in 1992.
You never can know too much about pi, after all ...