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Happy Pi Day!

Today is 3.14 2007, or Pi day if you are in the know. Pi, is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference (around the circle) of a circle to its diameter (across the circle). Pi is usually calculated to 3 digits, 3.14. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. There is no end to Pi! With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 51 billion decimal places to date.

The number is so long that there are actually contests to see who can recite the most places in Pi. Earlier this year a man from Pennsylvania recited 12,887 digits, to be exact. It took him 3 hours and 40 minutes to do it. When he ended, he became the North American record holder. The previous record holder had recited Pi to 10,980 places.

 While impressive, Guinness World Records says that the world record for the number of places in Pi being recited is 67,890, accomplished someone in China.

It begins with 3.14159265 and never stops, never repeating the same pattern - a string of digits that has captivated both numbers buffs and those looking for a deeper mystical meaning. Physicists have noted the ubiquity of pi in nature. Pi is obvious in the disks of the moon and the sun. The double helix of DNA revolves around pi. Pi hides in the rainbow, and sits in the pupil of the eye, and when a raindrop falls into water pi emerges in the spreading rings. Pi can be found in waves and ripples and spectra of all kinds, and therefore pi occurs in colors and music.

Here are some interesting Pi pieces of trivia:

• Albert Einstein was born on 3/14/1879, Pi Day 1879!
• There are no occurrences of the sequence 123456 in the first million digits of pi. But of the eight 12345’s, three are followed by another 5. The sequence 012345 occurs twice, and in both cases it is followed by another 5
• The sequence 3333333 appears at the 710,100th digit and again at the 3,204,765th digit. Not so surprising, really. In fact, the first million digits include seven-long runs of the same number for each numeral other than 2 and 4.
• And finally one that we can all use, you can determine your hat size by measuring the circumference of your head, then divide by pi, and round off to the nearest one-eighth inch.

So it is a cool number, and it seems to be everywhere, and way to long to remember.

Happy Pi day

3.14.2007

ian