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Science

A Celebration of Pi 66

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.
Chip Unicorn writes "In San Francisco, the Exploratorium is holding the twelfth annual Pi Day on March 14 (3.14) at 1:59pm (3.14159). Seems like a good place to bring in young nerds-to-be. "
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A Celebration of Pi More

A Celebration of Pi

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  • I once knew 250 digits. Now I can sometimes make it to 150, but sometimes mess up at around digit 70-90...
  • Check your math there...

    I think 15:92 == 16:32, or 4:32 in the afternoon.

    And what time zone is that, anyway? If it's UTC, that's about half past 12 where I am (-0400, Eastern Daylight Time)...
  • Feh ... That would mean Pi = 3.141359 ... Pi day is celebrated at 1:59 *AM* for those true Pi worshipers.
  • ahhh.... but what do we know of pluto? we have only known about it for such a short while...
  • I visited in the 80's, the toys they had then were interesting enough. Now that I've been reminded about it, I need to find an excuse to visit when I'm out that way this summer.

    Oh, and Marie Callender (sp?) pies are good stuff. Hope the brats appreciate it.
  • I once knew PI to 51 digits, but that was 20 years ago, and now I can only reliably remember 23...

    Somewhere, I have a link to a story about someone who claims to have memorized 42,000 digits.

  • pi day (Score:1)

    by Jaeger ( 2722 )
    Last year, my high school celebrated 12 pi day -- 12 pi years of the school's operation. It was a nice fun day to attempt to get people excited about math. Of course, I found it entertaining, but I'm already excited about math. My calculus teacher started it 2 pi years ago just after the school's 30th anniversary, at which point he wondered why we find it necessary to celebrate specific anniversaries -- if we celebrate 30 years, why shouldn't we celebrate 12 pi years?
  • For us afternoon types...
  • The new MAX tunnel in Portland, OR contains pi digits that are rumored to be incorrect. We're going to look for those, eat pie, and see if we can find a copy of the proposed Indiana legislation to make pi=3 (yes, just 3, like in the Bible).


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • Light rail tunnel. The New E W one.

    The engineers wrote pi to some couple thousand places on the tunnel wall. Maybe as a reference, can't say.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.
  • I'm thinking of the part in the bible where it says some altar was 1 cubit across and three cubits around or something, making pi=3.

    Indiana tried to make pi legally 3 simply because the bible says so.


    --
    As long as each individual is facing the TV tube alone, formal freedom poses no threat to privilege.

  • 6:02 on October (10) the 23rd.

    And serve avocados.

    Sorry, chemistry joke.

  • The Exploratorium is superneet.. I wonder if they will serve pie ..

  • The Metropolitan Area Express (MAX) tunnel referred to goes through a mountain in West Portland. In celebration of Pi Day, 1999 Squeeze Truck and I dragged/////// took our families to see this wonder of the modern world.
    One of the pieces of art in the tunnel is a number:

    3.1415926535
    821480865144
    288109757245
    870066330572
    703698336733
    620005681271
    420199561150
    244594555982
    534904897932

    The above number rearranged into groups of 10:
    3.
    1415926535
    8214808651
    4428810975
    7245870066
    3305727036
    9833673362
    0005681271
    4201995611

    Pi to 1,000 places. Notice the numbers in bold and italic typeface:
    PI=3.
    1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679
    8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128 4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196
    4428810975 6659334461 2847564823 3786783165 2712019091 4564856692 3460348610 4543266482 1339360726 0249141273
    7245870066 0631558817 4881520920 9628292540 9171536436 7892590360 0113305305 4882046652 1384146951 9415116094
    3305727036 5759591953 0921861173 8193261179 3105118548 0744623799 6274956735 1885752724 8912279381 8301194912
    9833673362 4406566430 8602139494 6395224737 1907021798 6094370277 0539217176 2931767523 8467481846 7669405132
    0005681271 4526356082 7785771342 7577896091 7363717872 1468440901 2249534301 4654958537 1050792279 6892589235
    4201995611 2129021960 8640344181 5981362977 4771309960 5187072113 4999999837 2978049951 0597317328 1609631859
    5024459455 3469083026 4252230825 3344685035 2619311881 7101000313 7838752886 5875332083 8142061717 7669147303
    5982534904 2875546873 1159562863 8823537875 9375195778 1857780532 1712268066 1300192787 6611195909 2164201989

    But it's ART!

    Squeeze Truck and his wife provided pumpkin pie; my wife made chocolate pie; I wore my PIg belt buckle and pi T-shirt.

    It was truly a joyous and memorable occasion!

    Visit the "Friends of Pi" web site at: http://www.ast.univie.ac.at/~wasi/PI/pi_klub.html

    For the German-challenged:
    http://www.ast.univie.ac.at/~wasi/PI/pi_club.htm l

    Pi Vobiscum,

    Ted Rolle
  • Especially since I will be at a lan party then :)
  • Does anyone celebrate e day? (Feb 7, at 18:28).
    e's always been *my* favorite irrational number, but pi gets all the publicity *sigh*
  • This whole PI date is too US centric. What we need is at least 15 month in the year and we will all celebrate on the 3'th day of that month.
  • Infidels! Baguette is the only true path!

    : realises the link is about pi, not pie. Ooops...
  • because it is 3.141592 ... (ad naseum) (sp!) so 15:92 == 16:02 :) therefore it really should be 4:02 in the afternoon
  • I hope this is a joke. In the case that it isn't... this sounds really boring. If you're going to have a Pi day, make it a little more interesting with a showing of Pi, or music from the movie. whatever. This sounds cute for about the first 15 minutes before everyone falls asleep.

    adam pennington
  • <sigh> It's nice to know I'm not the only one who gets excited about math. I just love it--(I'm trying to kick the &mdash; habit)--I was so happy when I read in my math textbook how to calculate e one way (limit of (1+1/x)^x as x approaches infinity, or limit of (1+x)^(1/x) as x approaches zero). I immediately loaded my REXX intepreter, set NUMERIC DIGITS to 10.000, and calculated away.

    Then I found out there is a much better, faster way to calculate e--and it was in a literature textbook from a Mennonite publisher, of all places.

    Well, that's enough ramblings for tonight. I'm glad to know there are people like who love nature and math and the way everything works. It's just so cool!

    Joshua

  • In High School (last year) I once memorized Pi to roughly 100 digits. My short term memory started to give way and I couldn't remember small things like why I had gone into the kitchen... Also, I couldn't find anyone who would even pretend to care to I stopped. I can recall around 2-25 now. *sigh*
  • Guiness book of records uses the pi test to see who has the "greatest" memory I think.

    Some japanese guy could remember 70,000 - beating the previous record of 42,000.

    I don't think he could remember his wife's name after reciting all the numbers over like 3 whole days or something.

    3.14452562525-(munch on sandwich)-154124725024-(make love to wife)-13058735....
  • Too bad San Francisco/Silicon Valley just sucks now. It's been flooded with wannabes and yuppies who work for Taos. Hopefully this will change in time and everything goes back to normal and I'll probably relocate back there.
  • Now this is one we can all celebrate properly, except its in July. The *real* 2.7 is obviously the 2nd of July, so there. I suppse we actually missed the true e day by nearly 171 years (2.7.1828)
  • There's a copy of it here [urbanlegends.com]. From section 2: "By taking the quadrant of the circle's circumference for the linear unit ...." Sounds like pi = 4 to me, but he lost me a long time before then.

    But, later on: "the ratio of the diameter and circumference is as five-fourths to four." Or, 1/pi = (5/4)/4; hence, pi = 16/5 = 3.2. I guess you can't expect consistency if you're making it up as you go. :^)

    --

  • Indiana tried to make pi legally 3 simply because the bible says so.

    I respectfully disagree. IIRC, some mathematical hack (or is that crack? ^_^) who honestly thought pi was wrong had a friend in the Indiana legislature. No Bible involved.

    The bill cites the author's solutions of the trisection of the angle, duplication of the cube and quadrature of the circle. Major loony bin type, from a mathematical point of view.

    If you prefer, you can reply to kaahaa@anull.net to continue this (remove the a's to reply).

    --

  • ...ring of real numbers...

    Wouldn't that be the field of real numbers? Could be the ring of integers, I suppose.
  • Yes, but can you prove it? THAT is what truly rocks, seeing that this equation results naturally from a rather natural representation of complex numbers, and that this results from the (Taylor? McLaurin? it's been too long) expansion of trigonometric and exponential functions. Then seeing all this come together in solving linear differential equations makes you realize that sometimes, beauty can be quite utilitarian, and utility can be quite beautiful.
  • 2+2=5 for sufficiently large values of 2.
  • e is shorter? What? They both have a (denumerable (aleph zero)) infinite quantity of digits after the decimal, right? Now, e is *less* than pi, if that's what you meant...

    Also, you can (read: must) model nature with pi, look at what happens with waves on water and their interaction/interference, and tell me you could model any of that for a realistic amount of time w/o using an accurate value of pi.
  • No way! There's 60 minutes in an hour. 92-60=32, last I checked. So it'd be 16:32.
  • I hate to sound ignorant, but what's a MAX tunnel? Is it similar to a Lincoln Tunnel? If so, how does such a thing contain pi digits?
    *pondering weird such things too early on Saturday AM*

    Neil
  • how can you celebrate pi day at 13:59? Those of us true pi lovers will be up at 1:59 (1:59 AM, for all you 12 hour day sissies!) celebrating pi at it's proper time of the day!
  • My highschool chemistry teacher celibrated mole day, it was frightening how excited he got over it after 42 something years of teaching chemistry to kids who couldn't care less.
  • so i'll keep a look out for /. t's.
  • Well, I know what I'm doing now...

    -Chris
  • Didn't get to go to Pi Day, but had a Marie Callendar lemon merengue at pismo beach. Pretty good, if I might say so. What an exciting first visit to sillicon valley. :)

    -Chris

  • Since when can you celebrate a whole day at a specific time? Seems strange to me...

    Ho well... I wonder if they're celebrating e day, and i day (whoops...), and how about g day? =)

    np: Jimi Tenor - Xinotepe Heat (Organism)

  • here's my logic.

    if you truly want to convert pi to a time of day, why not treat the constant as a fraction of an hour rather than merely massaging digits?

    by my calculation if you want convert 3.14159... hours to H:M:S, you get 03:08:29.733355...
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • On march 14th, 1879, albert einstien was born. 100 years later, in 1979, pluto went out of it's normal orbit and became the 8th farthest planet from the sun, with neptune being the last. 20 years later, on march 14, 1999 it goes back to it's normal place as the farthest planet.

    freaky, eh?
  • pi = three, for large values of three.

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