This is for Cici and Ruby regarding an older posting on Pi!
Jim Stingl | In My Opinion Geometry fans rejoice - it's Pi Day
Celebrating Pi Day This column is about math. Wait, don't turn the page.
Because it's also about free pastry.
Today is Pi Day. I've capitalized those words even though it's not official in the slightest. If it falls on a weekday, you still get your mail and you best show up for work.
Math geeks and calendar freaks collide today. Pi is 3.14, and the date is 3/14. If that amazing convergence is enough to make the Earth stop turning, it will be easier to determine its circumference, thanks to pi.
Pi Day celebrations are absolutely not happening all over town. I found two. Discovery World is giving prizes to math wizards and those Einsteins who can recite from memory the most digits of pi. (By the way, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Freaky, I know.)
I'll get you started on pi: 3.141592653589793. But I'm guessing that one thing you won't win by knowing this is a hot date. The mathematical constant goes on without any repeating patterns right into infinity, or until Discovery World's 5 p.m. closing time on Sunday, whichever comes first.
Plus the museum is offering - are Euclidean me?! - free pi tattoos. "I'm wearing one now. I had to make sure they worked," said Discovery World spokesman Rich Cieslak.
You don't have to prove any level of arithmetic proficiency to get a free slice of pie - apple, cherry or blueberry - at Whole Foods Market on North and Prospect starting at 3:14 p.m.
"Last year, I had someone come up and recite pi to 12 places for me, which is kind of impressive," said the store's marketing specialist, Autumn Faughn.
I asked workers and shoppers at the store what they know about pi. Some had never heard of it. At the other end of the spectrum is fourth-grader Benjamin Rondini, who drew me a sketch of a circle and explained that multiplying the diameter times pi gives you the circumference, or distance around the circle.
If you'd rather know the area of a circle, it's pi times the radius squared. There are probably countless everyday uses of these formulas, but I can't think of any. Maybe how many people can fit around your dining room table.
"I've never needed to use it," said east sider Maria Camera. "I didn't really understand it in the first place."
That's true of most of us, even if we can retrieve the 3.14 number from dusty memory cells. Yet somehow pi manages to have 5,333 friends on Facebook. The true nuts are looking ahead to Pi Year, which is either 3141 or 3142 if you round up.
My favorite application of pi is one I just learned from the Internet last week. It's called Buffon's needle and it doesn't involve circles at all. If you drop needles on a floor, and those needles are the same length as the width of the parallel floor boards, the probability that any needle lands on any line between the boards is 2 divided by pi. I just blew your mind, didn't I?
Ah, so much more to say about pi. A British savant named Daniel Tammet once rattled off pi up to 22,514 digits from memory in just five hours, which landed him on David Letterman's show a few years ago.
Wikipedia says students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yell out a cheer that includes 3.14159, which rhymes nicely with sine or cosine. I called an MIT public relations person at the school to verify this. I thought it was a rational question about an irrational number.
1 comment:
This is for Cici and Ruby regarding an older posting on Pi!
Jim Stingl | In My Opinion
Geometry fans rejoice - it's Pi Day
Celebrating Pi Day This column is about math. Wait, don't turn the page.
Because it's also about free pastry.
Today is Pi Day. I've capitalized those words even though it's not official in the slightest. If it falls on a weekday, you still get your mail and you best show up for work.
Math geeks and calendar freaks collide today. Pi is 3.14, and the date is 3/14. If that amazing convergence is enough to make the Earth stop turning, it will be easier to determine its circumference, thanks to pi.
Pi Day celebrations are absolutely not happening all over town. I found two. Discovery World is giving prizes to math wizards and those Einsteins who can recite from memory the most digits of pi. (By the way, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. Freaky, I know.)
I'll get you started on pi: 3.141592653589793. But I'm guessing that one thing you won't win by knowing this is a hot date. The mathematical constant goes on without any repeating patterns right into infinity, or until Discovery World's 5 p.m. closing time on Sunday, whichever comes first.
Plus the museum is offering - are Euclidean me?! - free pi tattoos. "I'm wearing one now. I had to make sure they worked," said Discovery World spokesman Rich Cieslak.
You don't have to prove any level of arithmetic proficiency to get a free slice of pie - apple, cherry or blueberry - at Whole Foods Market on North and Prospect starting at 3:14 p.m.
"Last year, I had someone come up and recite pi to 12 places for me, which is kind of impressive," said the store's marketing specialist, Autumn Faughn.
I asked workers and shoppers at the store what they know about pi. Some had never heard of it. At the other end of the spectrum is fourth-grader Benjamin Rondini, who drew me a sketch of a circle and explained that multiplying the diameter times pi gives you the circumference, or distance around the circle.
If you'd rather know the area of a circle, it's pi times the radius squared. There are probably countless everyday uses of these formulas, but I can't think of any. Maybe how many people can fit around your dining room table.
"I've never needed to use it," said east sider Maria Camera. "I didn't really understand it in the first place."
That's true of most of us, even if we can retrieve the 3.14 number from dusty memory cells. Yet somehow pi manages to have 5,333 friends on Facebook. The true nuts are looking ahead to Pi Year, which is either 3141 or 3142 if you round up.
My favorite application of pi is one I just learned from the Internet last week. It's called Buffon's needle and it doesn't involve circles at all. If you drop needles on a floor, and those needles are the same length as the width of the parallel floor boards, the probability that any needle lands on any line between the boards is 2 divided by pi. I just blew your mind, didn't I?
Ah, so much more to say about pi. A British savant named Daniel Tammet once rattled off pi up to 22,514 digits from memory in just five hours, which landed him on David Letterman's show a few years ago.
Wikipedia says students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology yell out a cheer that includes 3.14159, which rhymes nicely with sine or cosine. I called an MIT public relations person at the school to verify this. I thought it was a rational question about an irrational number.
Can you believe she never called me back?
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