Pie Day! (a.k.a. Pi Day)

Celebrate Pi Day! Source: http://bit.ly/eI19Hm

It probably should be a national holiday. After all, Pi is a pretty important…if you’re a mathematician.

The Greek letter Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th by math enthusiasts geeks all over the globe. Pi = 3.1415926535…the number continues infinitely without repeating any sequence, and computers have calculated Pi to more than 1 trillion digits past the decimal. Since it goes on for.ev.er, there’s the possibility that every number you know is hidden somewhere in it; phone numbers, birthday dates…even bank account numbers. Freakin’ amazing.

The mathematical ratio has been around for 4,000 years plus, but the Greek symbol we know as Pi turned 200 years old in 2006. Ancient Babylonians calculated Pi by measuring 3 times the square of a circle’s radius. A Babylonian tablet circa 1900–1680 BC shows a value of 3.125. Not to be outdone, Rhind Papyrus, an Egyptian in circa 1650 BC, calculated the area of a circle and indicated the approximate value of pi at 3.1605.

Pi in the Sky can be used to calculate a planet’s circular orbit compared to the diameter of the orbit. I’m sure astronomers are all over this.

A little closer to home…literally…closer than you think…pi is present in parts of the double helix of the DNA code.

And pi will come in very handy in the future when computers become smarter than us and take over. Just ask Spock. He triumphs over an evil computer by commanding it to compute pi to last digit in the Star Trek episode Wolf in the Fold. Just throwin’ that out there.

AND, did you know the first 144 digits of pi add up to 666? Some believe this is the biblical “mark of the Beast,” so I’m pretty sure math is going to be connected to the Antichrist.

Oddly, Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day (3.14 in 1879) in Ulm Wurttemberg, Germany. That’s freaky.

My father, who coincidentally was an architectural and structural engineer, was born on Pi Day as well. That’s just plain freaky as well.

The official celebration begins at 1:59 p.m., appropriately occurring at 3.14159.

For those of us who lean a little more to the right side of our brains, it’s an excellent reason to have some pie. In support of our left-brain brothers and sisters, of course.