Happy Pi Day

It’s no secret that I’m a math geek.  Back in school, I used to solve extremely complex math problems for fun.  I still do this from time to time.  For example, I recently felt compelled to figure out just how tall 20GB of data would be if all the 1’s and 0’s were printed out.  (It would stretch from the Earth to Mars at their closest.)

So it should be no surprise that I love celebrating PI day.

For those of you asking what Pi day is, one of the more interesting numbers in math is called Pi.  It’s an irrational number that is the ratio of a circle to its diameter.  Pi turns out to be very useful for many, many calculations.

Since it is irrational, Pi is infinitely long.  Most people remember Pi as being 3.14, but it actually is 3.1415926535….  People have calculated Pi to billions of digits.  (You can find this online, but it takes a LONG time to download!)  Of course, since March 14th is 3/14 (in the US, at least), we call today Pi day.  (Given that next year will be 2015, next year’s Pi day will be on 3/14/15.  At 9:26 and 53 seconds, the date and time will match Pi to 9 digits.)

To celebrate Pi day, you could do some math, look up some digits of Pi, see if certain word strings are in Pi, or just eat some pie.

How would you celebrate pi day?  With math or pie?  Or both?

Note: The pi image above is "Pi" by bnielsen.  It is available on OpenClipArt.org.