It's Pi Day!

Today is Pi day. Pi = 3.14 and today is 3/14.  I'm sure many of you thought you'd seen the last of pi when you finished high school geometry!  Social media is good about reminding us of things long forgotten, though, and math trivia is no exception.

So, what is pi exactly?  Well, according to  piday.org, Pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Make sense to you?  No?  piday.org also gives us the following history of pi.

"By measuring circular objects, it has always turned out that a circle is a little more than 3 times its width around. In the Old Testament of the Bible (1 Kings 7:23), a circular pool is referred to as being 30 cubits around, and 10 cubits across. The mathematician Archimedes used polygons with many sides to approximate circles and determined that Pi was approximately 22/7. The symbol (Greek letter “π”) was first used in 1706 by William Jones. A ‘p’ was chosen for ‘perimeter’ of circles, and the use of π became popular after it was adopted by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1737. In recent years, Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits past its decimal. Only 39 digits past the decimal are needed to accurately calculate the spherical volume of our entire universe, but because of Pi’s infinite & patternless nature, it’s a fun challenge to memorize, and to computationally calculate more and more digits."

If all that makes no sense to you, never fear.  Most people, including those of us FCL look at pi day as simply a great excuse to eat some pie!

Happy Pi Day!