March 14: Be Aware of the Pi of March!
Today is March 14, also known as Pi Day in honor of the mathematically useful irrational number which, as we all know, is used to measure the ratio of the diameter to the circumfrence of a circle.
Pi is a very old number. The Egyptians and the Babylonians knew about the existence of the constant ratio pi, although they didn't know the extent of its decimal figures as far as we do today. They calculated that it was a little bigger than 3. The Babylonians had an approximation of 3.125, while the Egyptians had a figure of about 3.160484.
In 1706, William Jones was the first to use the Greek letter pi as the symbol for the number – chosen because the letter, sounding like our letter "P", begins the Greek word for 'perimeter'. Pi is an infinite decimal, having infinitely many numbers to the right of the decimal point. Although many mathematicians have tried to find it, no repeating pattern for pi has ever been discovered. This is what makes the number irrational: it cannot be written as a fraction.
Now, while I've long been an admirer of pi (I mean, after all, who isn't? Mmmmm, pi...), I was not aware that there were such enthusasiasts of the irrational number that they have taken to memorizing long strings of the fraction that comes after the familiar 3.14159. There are whole groups that memorize these numbers. Well, perhaps I should say, an irrationalist here and there.
Take, for example, Akira Haraguchi, from Japan, who last fall accurately recited pi to 100,000 decimal places. It took him 16 hours, though it is not recorded as the world record. The documented world record belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. Or my personal favorite irrationalist, Marc Umile. According to the news item on Yahoo , twelve years ago, Umile picked up a book and read about pi's seemingly infinite, random string and wondered if he could apply the way music was absorbed to memorizing this infinite number. In 2004 he read the digits of pi into a tape recorder, a thousand at a time, and gave it a rhythm -- some numbers high-toned, some low. He then listened to the tape constantly for two years. Eventually he memorized 12,887 digits. Umile says he believes the fascination with pi has something to do with our desire to learn the ultimate truth of something. In his relig -- er, theory -- each decimal place takes you 10 times closer to the answer.
There are more rational pi-enthusiasts, of course. The students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology wish each other a happy Pi Day. In past years, the school has even tried to mail its acceptance letters on March 14. (It didn't always work out.) The MIT rallying cry includes "3.14159" ( to rhyme with "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!"). And the ability to recite long decimal strings of pi bestows a sort of bragging right, like how much money (or sex) you have, but there’s never a clear winner. Someone always knows more digits.
The joys of the Computer Age have brought the pi-obsessed an ability to calculate their great number to many, many, many decimal places – something like a trillion!. Here are 50,000 of them.
For the pi-enthusiasts among you, you might enjoy A History of Pi by Petr Beckman (Dorset Press) and you can find other pi info The Pi Pages. Or by googling, of course. There’s a good probability you’ll get at least 3.14159 26535 89793 sites to look at.
And of course, I’m posting this on 3-14 at 1:59 p.m.
Technorati Tags: Pi, Pi Day, irrational number, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
