Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Pi Day!


It's not irrational to celebrate Pi Day on 3/14.

Our crack research staff gave us this link to a site that purports to list one million digits of pi. We can't vouch for whether there really are a million digits shown at that site, but we did scroll down for some time -- and never did get to the end. Here's an excerpt: "3.1415926...."

Of course, so far as mathematicians know, you can't get to the end of pi. It's an irrational number, meaning it can not be expressed as the quotient of two integers (although you'll sometimes see it approximated at 22/7) and it never settles into any repeating pattern. And people have investigated: Wikipedia says that pi has been calculated to 10 trillion digits.

Interestingly, Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day in 1879. Astronaut Frank Borman turns 85 on March 14; Sir Michael Caine and Quincy Jones both turn 80. Eugene Cernan, the last man on the Moon, will turn 79 on Thursday. Most of Billy Crystal turns 65 on March 14. His face, of course, is considerably younger.

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