Pi Day —2020

OK, we’ve almost made it through the week — on to a happier topic….

Today is Pi Day — a holiday celebrated every year on March 14. If you’ve been using Pi Day as an excuse to eat pie, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. This special day was founded in 1988 by Physicist Larry Shaw and has become an international holiday celebrated all around the world in countries that follow the month/day date format. The digits in the date, March 14 or 3/14 are the first three digits of ∏ (3.14)
And if you’r really into pi, there are other days during the year that you can celebrate:
March 4 — this day marks the passing of 14% of the 3rd month of the year.
April 5 — by this day, 3.14 months of the year have passed.
November 10 — the 314th day of the year (this would be November 9 in leap years.)
And then there’s alway July 22 — which would be Pi Approximation Day. This date, when written in the day/month format — 22/7 — corresponds to the fraction (22/7) that is used to depict pi.

So let’s talk about Pi….
The symbol for Pi has been in use for over 250 years. The symbol was introduced by Williams Jones, and Anglo-Welsh philologist (someone who studies language) in 1706 and made popular by the mathematician Leonhard Euler.

Pi wasn’t alway known as pi. Before 1706, people referred the number we know as pi as “the quantity which when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference.” Obviously, people got tired of using that many words whenever they wanted to talk about pi. So good for William Jones for coming to our rescue. 

Some people believe that tau (which amounts to 2∏) is better suited to circle calculations. You can multiply ta with the radius of  circle to to calculate its circumference more intuitively. Tau/4 also represents the angle of a quarter of a circle. And — we can celebrate Tau Day on June 28.

But today is Pi Day — a day we can all use after the week we’ve had — happy Pi Day.
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