Pi or Pie…any reason to celebrate!

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It’s National Pi Day!!

March 14…or represented numerically as 3.14…is the day we celebrate the mathematical phenom, Pi. And because I just couldn’t improve on my post from a couple of years ago, I’ve copied and pasted it in today’s sharing. Also, I’m running short on time today so I’m cheating just a bit! 🙂

Enjoy Pi Day and some pie of the more tangible nature!

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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 world. 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 more than 4,000 years, 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.