This day every year is Pi Day and a lot of years it doesn’t get the recognition that it deserves on this blog. But today, let’s talk about and celebrate Pi which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter and equals 3.14…. In 2015, this date (3-14-15) was the only day this century that match pi, commonly approximated as 3.1415. Supercomputers have now worked pi out to over 13 trillion places — and still there no patterns or repetitions.
In 1897, Indiana state legislators tried passing a Pi Bill that legally defined pi as 3.2. Edward J. Goodwin, a physician, convinced a well-known mathematical monthly newspaper that he had solved what mathematicians had tried to do for generations: squaring the circle. Squaring the circle is the impossible task of finding the area of a circle by finding the area of a square around it. Goodwin claimed that pi was 3.2 instead of a continuous number. The bill never became a law thanks to Professor C.A. Waldo who convinced the Indiana Senate that Goodwin’s discovery was not possible.
You faithful readers may remember that a couple of years ago, I challenged a popular belief that during the spring equinox brooms will stand by themselves — straight up. My extensive research and experiments proved the concept to be no more than an old wives tale — check the March blog entries from a couple of years ago if you don’t believe me. Well, now I’m about to take on another challenge concerning pi. I have read and heard, that you can prove pi exists with matches, toothpicks, a pen, or anything else that is the same length. Here’s the way it works: You find a floor with parallel lines; you find matches, pins, pens, or any item exactly the same length. If you drop a hundred of them at random on the floor, the points touching a line will equal pi. The matches (or whatever you’re using) must be equal to the distance of the two parallel lines. After the matches are dropped, you multiply the number of matches thrown down by two and divide it by the total number of matches (or whatever) that touched a line, which will equal pi. I intend to duplicate that experiment and determine for myself if it’s really true. Hopefully it is and I won’t have to go through the disappointment I suffered with the broom experiment. I’ll probably report my findings here, so stay tuned — but instead of matches, I intend to use Eskimo Pie sticks (I thought that would be appropriate for a pi experiment.) So I now must eat 100 Eskimo Pies before I can begin my study. I figure after 100 Eskimo Pies, I won’t really get upset no matter what the results. Just another example of my contribution to science.
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