Happy Pi Day

It is March 14th, the official pi day for those of us who love to celebrate it.  One year, the community college I worked at arranged a Pi day celebration. We had a scavenger hunt of facts, a pi throw, jokes, created art work and we even played music based on the digits of pi.  It was fun.

There are facts such as:

1.  The symbol used to represent pi has been in use over 250 years.  

2.  Since pi is an irrational number, we can never calculate an accurate area of a circle or volume of a sphere. 

3. Certain people loved pi so much, they created a language based on pi and call it pi-lish. In this the number of letters in a word is matched to the digit in the value of pi. In fact, one person wrote a whole novel called Not A Wake in this language. 

4. Before it was decided to use pi for the name of this value, it was called "the quantity which when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference". A Welsh Mathematician came up with using pi as the symbol in 1706.

5. There is a circular parade that happens every year on Pi day at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. This might have stopped due to Covid but before then it was a regular occurrence.

6.  To stress test a computer, they have it calculate pi to see how well it works.  It acts as a digital cardiogram for the computer.  

7.  Early Egyptians believed that the great pyramids of Giza were built on the tenants of pi. They believed that the vertical height and the perimeter of the base had a direct relationship with each other. 

8.  In the movie Contact, scientists are able to find hidden messages in the digits of pi from the creators of the human race.  In the series, Star Trek, there is the episode "Wolf in the Fold" where Spock defeats the evil computer by having it calculate pi to the last digit.

9.  If we calculated the circumference of the earth to 9 places, the error would be no more than one quarter of an inch over 25,000 miles which is an extremely small error.

10. Pi day began back in 1988 at the Exploratorium by physist Larry Shaw.

Just a few facts to use as a way of celebrating Pi day.  If you want to know more about pi, do a quick search and you'll find all sorts of cool facts. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Happy Pi Day to all.