This Saturday, March 14, otherwise denoted as 3.14, the mathematically minded people of the world will celebrate Pi Day, in honor of the famously irrational number calculated by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971... (the digits never end or repeat in any known way).
They celebrate Pi Day each and every year, but this time around, they are anxiously looking forward to Massive Pi Day, a once-in-a-century event caused by the year ending in the digits 15. Not having the mathematical prowess to write an article about some auspicious aspect of Pi, I chose instead to share with you my short, best-of-the-web listing of pi stories, anecdotes and trivia. I hope you enjoy this little slice of Pi:
Pi Day
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Pi Before Pi
On MentalFloss.com in 2013, Roma Panganiban gave readers a short history on the calculation of Pi. He explained that a papyrus describes how ancient Egyptians came pretty close to today’s concensus of 3.1416 with their 2000 BC procedure to find “the area of a round field with a diameter of 9 khet.”
Pi Day: How 3.14 helps find other planets, and more
In 2012, Zeynep Rice reported on CNN’s Lightyears blog about how scientists use Pi to conduct their research into such endeavors as searching for new planets, describing the expansion of the universe, smashing protons, calculating gravity and more. As for new planets, one researcher explains that Pi helps researchers determine the density of new celestial bodies, which in turn reveals whether the object is “mostly gaseous like Jupiter, rocky like Earth, or something in between.”
Calculating Pi to 10 Trillion Digits; the last number is 5
Scientists working to benchmark the speed of their latest and greatest computers have often turned to calculating many digits of Pi. The most recent feat found through a cursory search of the Internet dates back to 2011. More interestingly, writer Brian Benchoff notes: “If you’re wondering if it would be faster to calculate Pi on a top 500 supercomputer, you’d be right. Those boxes are a little busy predicting climate change, nuclear weapons yields, and curing cancer, though.
Life of Pi: Classroom Scene (HD)
Like thousands of other Americans, I watched the 2012 3-D adventure film, Life of Pi, in a movie theater. The award-winning drama, as well as the earlier novel by Yann Martel, follows a young man, Piscine Molitor Patel, as he struggles in elementary school primarily because of his classmates’ impolite mispronunciation of his first name. Eventually, tired of the teasing, he learns about the mathematical term Pi and adopts the shortened moniker. Enjoy the scene where he explains his new nickname to his classmates, as portrayed by a Film as Literature class at South Anchorage High School:
A Conversation with Berkeley Lab’s 'Pi Guy': David Bailey
Last year, Linda Vu of Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, wrote a Q&A article featuring mathematician and computer scientist David Bailey, a colleague of hers at LBNL who is also known as Pi Guy. Of the continuing interest in Pi, Bailey says, “It is arguably the only topic of mathematics that was studied in ancient times, yet still intrigues mathematicians today.”
American Pi: US population passes 3.14 hundred million
In 2012, Megan Gannon of NBCNews.com aced headline writing by combining a mathematical concept with a demographics story and dividing it all by a longtime favorite American ballad. That year, according to the Census Bureau, “the American population reached 314,159,265, or Pi (3.14159265) times 100 million.
28 facts about Pi that you probably didn't know
Finally, let’s end with another video. Several years ago, Brandon Butler of Network World compiled a page of Pi trivia. One of my favorite entries here, and also in tribute to the recent passing of Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, is a short clip in which Nimoy’s character, Spock, references the nature of Pi:
