Today is Pi Day; the day the first three digits of Pi, 3.14, match the calendar date, March 14, and this year it’s official according to Congress, which last week voted 391-10 to designate today as National Pi Day in an attempt to raise the profile of science and math in education.
The first Pi Day celebrations were held at the San Francisco Exploratorium when the now retired Larry Shaw decided the day was worth commemorating. Since then, the annual geek celebration has grown and is now held across the United States at universities, museums and even some folks’ homes.
So what is Pi?
It’s a mathematical constant representing the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter. It’s also an irrational number, with an infinite number of decimal places and can’t be written as a ratio of two whole numbers. According to Physics Central, supercomputers have been able to compute Pi out to over 1.3 trillion decimal places without seeing a pattern emerge.
Image Credit: Qwantz
For the hardcore, the Joy of Pi has listed the first ten thousand digits for you to peruse, or if you’re particularly keen, why not try to take the crown from Japan’s Akari Haraguchi, the current record holder for being able to recite the first 100,000 digits of Pi from memory.
An interesting coincidence; today also happens to be Albert Einstein‘s birthday.
Update: oops – 22nd, not 21st
