Most Pi Days merely include the first three digits of pi -- 3/14 -- but this year's extends out a whopping 10 digits, if you look at it the right way.
Happy Pi Day! Now comes the most vexing question at all on this holiday for math geeks: how exactly do you celebrate a date that simply happens to share the same numerals as the first three of the mathematical constant known as Pi?
March 14th is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world to commemorate the inexplicably popular constant known as pi, which starts with 3.14 — rounded, that is, it extends to infinity and computers have gotten to 10 trillion digits. The number describes the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
But this Pi Day is an extra special one: that’s because today’s date matches the first five digits of Pi — 3.1415 — not just the first three.
And it goes further than that. The next digits are 92653, meaning that many people are going to wait until 9:26 p.m. and 53 seconds to celebrate the ultimate “pi moment,” according to a Los Angeles Times report.
Pi has been around for a long time — about 4,000 years, actually, ever since the ancient Babylonians figured out that pi was about 3 back in 1900 BC, and Greek mathematician Archimedes determined that pi was closer to 22/7, a more accurate reading, albeit not as exact as it is today.
So how does one celebrate Pi Day? Why, make pie of course. But that’s not the only thing to do. The education department at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has created the Pi Day Challenge, which invites the public to use pi to try to map a distant planet or estimate an ocean’s volume on another planet. The answers can be tweeted to the JPL’s Twitter account with the hastag #PiDay.
And because pi’s string of numbers is infinite, it’s certain that your birthday will appear somewhere in there, and the Find Your Pi Day website allows you to find out where it is.
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