Today is March 14th, 2013. Now, ladies and gentlemen, what would you say the most anticipated day in March is, hmm? I’ll give you a hint: It doesn’t have anything to do with the color green, leprechauns, or beer. (Okay, maybe beer.) Stumped yet?
It’s Ï€ day, of course! Ï€, spelled pi and pronounced like ‘pie’, represents a value of about 3.14159, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference to it’s diameter. Basically, if you took the edge of a circle and cut it so it would lay flat on the ground, it would be as long as 3.14 of those circles would be wide. It’s useful in all kinds of equations, though it has probably appeared more in pop culture than it has in math lately.
Chances are you’ve heard of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s song ‘White & Nerdy’, (a parody of the song “Ridin’” by Chamillionaire) specifically one line in which he boasts of knowing ‘Ï€ to a thousand places’. This is no small feat, considering Ï€ is an infinitely repeating pattern of digits. In fact, Ï€ has been calculated out into the trillions of digits, and it just keeps going. There’s a somewhat infamous website I discovered awhile back where Ï€ has been calculated out to one million places and left for public display. It’s appropriately named, too, as you can see in the link: http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/ (Hint: 3141.html)
I’ve also found this nice musical tribute to Ï€ wrapped up in a rom hack of a childhood classic favorite video game, Pokemon Yellow. A little something to bring out the nostalgia.
To close us out today, I have a little something for you, possibly the real reason why everyone loves π so much, whether they know it or not. We established earlier that Ï€ is an infinite, non-repeating decimal, but I want you to think about this for just a minute. Just think about it: an infinite, non-repeating number. Every possible number combination exists somewhere in that number, in Ï€. Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is every book you will ever read, and every book that has ever been — or will be — written. The name of every person you will ever know or love, the date, time, and manner of their death, your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe are all present somewhere in Ï€. This article you are reading right now is already written somewhere in Ï€, even as I am writing it. Even the very thoughts in your head right now. All present somewhere in the vast, immeasurable string of digits that is Ï€.
Mind blowing, ain’t it?
Enjoy the rest of your π day, everyone!
