You probably find it hard to believe that I, the self-proclaimed king of holidays, have been letting a significant holiday occasion slip by unnoticed — and uncelebrated — by me. I am of course referring to Pi (π) Day. A day to celebrate the world’s most famous mathematical constant.
March 14, when written as 3/14 represents the first three digits of pi (π), the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Coincidently, or maybe not, it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday. Mathematically, what is apparently so attractive to mathematicians is that the number — 3 followed by a ceaseless string of random numbers after the decimal point is irrational. That means that it cannot be expressed through the division of two whole numbers — but it is also a transcendental number, which means that it isn’t the root of any algebraic number. Who wouldn’t get excited about something like that?
The Pi Day that I just missed again wasn’t just any Pi Day. It was the most perfect Pi Day that will ever happen for any of us. For the full 24 hours of 3/14/15 will be the one and only Pi Day that actually contained the first five numbers of the number pi — 3.1415.
The first official, large-scale celebration of Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Today, they have a special ceremony annually at the Exploratorium on 3/14 at 1:59 a.m. PST — that makes it 3.14159, the first six digits of pi. On March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution (HRES 224) recognizing March 14 as National Pi Day.
In 1706, William Jones, a self-taught mathematician published a work titled, A summary of Achievement in Mathematics. That is where the symbol π appears for the first time in scientific literature to denote the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Jones realized that the decimal 3.141592…. never ends and that it cannot be expressed precisely. He proclaimed, “The exact proportion between the diameter and the circumference can never be expressed by numbers.” That was why he recognized that it needed its own symbol to represent it.
Circles have always fascinated people. Early on, it was figured out that a circle is always a little more that 3 times its width around. In the Old Testament, a circular pool is referred to as being 30 cubits around and 10 cubits across (1 Kings 7:23.) A ‘p’ was originally chosen (before π) to indicate the ‘perimeter’ — it turns out that in the Greek alphabet, π is the 16th letter and in the English alphabet, p is also the 16th letter; so pi must be the same in every language.
Some people believe Pi contains the answers to the universe. Pi has 6.4 billion known digits that would take approximately 133 years to recite without stopping. In 2005, Chao Lu, a graduate student in China became the Guinness record holder for reciting pi — he recited the number to 67, 980 digits in 24 hours and 4 minutes. In the Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” Spock foiled the evil computer by commanding it to compute to the last digit the value of pi.
I’m truly embarrassed that I let a holiday like this slip by with no celebration. Rest assured that it is now on my calendar and there will be the appropriate festivities here in West Virginia on all future 3/14s…
Sorry I missed it, but a belated Happy Pi Day and a happy belated birthday to my friend Albert, who always said, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler…”
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