Today is March 14. Or 3/14. Or possibly 3.14. Or, you may be seeing where I’m going here… pi day.
3.14 would be a rough calculation of pi, the mathematical constant that helps us discover the circumference of a circle. Or the area of a circle, sphere or cylinder. One of those things we all learn in school, but may never actually have to use often in life. But it’s good to know. Just in case.
Since pi is 3.141592654… and goes on and on without every repeating, it’s a pretty special number. It also sounds like pie, with an e, which is most often round. So if you happen to be celebrating pi day by eating a pie, you can calculate the circumference of your pie using pi. Or just eat it.
But centuries ago, people started noticing that when you measured the outside of a circle, it was just over three time as big around as it was across. So they came up with a constant for that ratio. Although the constant wasn’t all that constant at first. The Babylonians had it figured at 3.125. The Egyptians figured it was more like 3.16. Archimedes, who seemed to have way too much time on his hands, used that time to work it out to closer to 223 divided by 71. Or maybe even 22 divided by 7, which was even closer. But that worked out to 3.14159… it keeps going. Forever. It doesn’t stop and it doesn’t repeat. Which is just one of the cool things about pi.
It’s really a pretty special number and has kept mathematicians occupied for thousands of years. Now we can just get computers to work out the number. Centuries ago, mathematicians would draw a circle, then draw a square around it, then keep adding sides to the square until the polygon you were drawing got really close to the shape of the circle. Then you could take the diameter of the circle and the length of all those sides and work out pi. One guy in the 1600s worked it out to thirty-eight digits past the decimal point, which is the best anyone ever did that way. Although computers have now worked it out to thirty-one trillion digits.
They also say pi is a transcendental number. Which has nothing to do with meditation, but somehow refers to a number of things. Although about the only one I can understand is that it means you can’t square a circle.
But for people into math, pi is pretty important and worth celebrating.
For me, it sounds like pie so I should eat some in celebration. Maybe throw a little ice cream on there. And if the scoop of ice cream is perfectly round, we could work out the area of the sphere by using pi. Or just eat it.