And now for a few fun facts about Pi / Pie. See if you can tell which fact belongs to which one!
- March 14 is Pi/Pie day (3.14) and Albert Einstein was born on that day too.
- Pumpkin Pie/Pi was introduced to the pilgrims second Thanksgiving in 1623.
- In the Star Trek movie, Wolf in the Fold, Spock foils the evil computer by ordering it to compute to last digit the value of pi/pie. In the real world, computers can undergo a ‘digital cardiogram’ (a stress test) by computing pi/pie.
- The American Pie Council is an organization committed to preserving America’s pi/pie heritage and promoting American’s love affair with pi/pies.
- The Guinness World Records for memorising pie/pi (this practice is called piphilology) was achieved by Chao Lu, who recited pi from memory to 67,890 places. It took him 24 hours and 4 minutes with 4 years of practice.
- Pi/pie cannot be accurately represented in fraction form. Most of us know it as 22/7, but this only represents 0.00000849%. However, it would be more accurately represented with this fraction 104348/33215 (00000001056%).
In high school I memorized PI to 43 significant digits (42 digits past the decimal point) for no particular reason… Also, anytime I hand-print a word or someone’s name that has two consecutive ‘T’s in it, like SCOTT, I always use PI in place of the ‘T’s. I am of course printing in all upper-case or it wouldn’t look right.
I wonder if there really was no significance to 42, since it seems to be the answer to most problems…
TT – I like that – might pinch it 🙂
Yeah… Douglas Adams was why I stopped at 42… it just felt right… but I had no other real reason for memorizing so many digits, except to annoy people I knew as I would rattle them off sometimes 🙂
Ha, I knew there was a reason!
Not a pumpkin pie fan, but I do like pumpkin bread. What do you think of tau, which equals 2 x pi? Those who promote tau say it would simplify all those formulas that use 2*pi.
It might… but it also obscures things… formulas like pi*radius-squared yield the natural 2*pi*radius formula as a derivative (calculus) whereas substitution of tau for the 2*pi obscures that relationship between the rate of change (circumference) and the area of the circle.
With the serious out of the way… The silly comment I wanted to post was…
Pi = 3.1415926535
Pie = 8.5397342226
🙂