Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Best Day Ever

It's Pi Day! Few other days are so worth celebrating than Pi Day. What did Columbus do? He stole a map from Portugal to prove something pretty much everyone had already figured out centuries before. Valentine's Day was created to help out the failing greeting card industry. But Pi Day? The irrational constant Pi shapes grand structures and monuments. Only the first 39 digits of pi are needed to calculate the circumference of the visible universe with an accuracy of merely the width of a single hydrogen atom. Albert Einstein was born on Pi day. And without the number Pi we wouldn't have delicious blackberry filled baked goodness.

What do we know about Pi? We, of course, know that the 359th digit position contains the number 360 - the number of degrees in a circle. Even children know that Pi is extremely useful when describing the double helix of DNA. I would struggle to find a single person who doesn’t know that Babylonians first calculated Pi by using the fraction 3-1/8. And lest we forget that the pyramid at Giza's height relationship with the perimeter of its base approximates Pi.

What you might not know about Pi is that - despite being studied for more than 4000 years, the symbol by which we commonly recognize the number (the Greek letter pi), has only been used for the last 250 years. Originally suggested by William Jones, pi was popularized by rock-star extreme master mathematician extraordinaire Leonhard Euler in 1737, presumably in his exceedingly popular book, Mathematical Proof As to Why I Am So Awesome.

Many mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers have spent large portions of their lives devoted to calculating Pi in order to impress the ladies. Ludolph Van Ceulen accurately calculated Pi to the 36th digit - the full number is in fact call the Ludolph number - and rumor has it that all 36 numbers were inscribed on his now lost tombstone.

William Shanks painstakingly hand calculated the first 707 digits for years. Only to find out later he made a mistake on his 527th calculation meaning that the remaining 180 numbers were wrong. He gave up.

Richard Feynman - in an attempt to prove to his fussy father he wasn't wasting time at University as a math major - identified a sequence of six number nines in a row, now known as the Feynman Point. Why is this important? It's not. Kinda' neat, though.

Even today, Pi continues to be one of the most important constants in Architecture, math, astronomy, biology, art, politics, and early Nineties Celebrity criminal trials. Even competitions are held for the accurate memorization of the number Pi; the current record holder being Hiroyoki Gotu, who in 1995 memorized 42,195 places. We can be certain that after completion of this monumental feat, the entire audience pointed at him and shouted, "Nerd!"

So today, take time to reflect on the number Pi while jamming as much pecan crusty goodness into your mouth as possible. For because of some crazy mathematicians, you can now calculate to within a fraction of a molecule the volume of that sweet nomy flakiness, to be sure that it will all fit in your stomach.

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