Unless you were alive in 1592, this is the closest to the perfect “Pi day” you’ll ever get. 3/14/15. And if you want to take a moment to pause at 9:26:53 (am or pm? Time zone? Country?) we’ll be right there with you. Well, sorta of.
Now, before you laugh, and think Pi is just a number, think again. It’s almost magical in nature. It’s effects on our daily lives is found everywhere. From biology to astrophysics. In the perspective of history, it can be used as a milestone to mark many different culture’s advancement of math and science. In short, Pi is a keystone of the modern world. With out it, we’d never would have gone to the moon. We might sill be on horse back. And forget electronics. That fun stuff never would have happened.
(As a side note, on this day, 3/14, just happens to be Albert Einstein birthday. Happy birthday!)
We hope you have an awesome Pi day. We would love to see you in the comments too. For example, we’d love to hear about and see posts of algorithms that can compute Pi. How far can you compute Pi on a Raspberry Pi? Or even child hood stories of your first encounter with that magical number. Post up, and let us know your thoughts.
We’ll leave you with this cute video after the break, It’s an 8-year-old reciting 200 digits of Pi . But if you need more digits….There is 1 million digits of pi.
Hard ‘n Phirm – Pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDMBtQjS1bQ
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDMBtQjS1bQ&w=560&h=315%5D
Kate Bush and evidence public television kicks ass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V98soOyQWKY
Pi = 2 is a ballpark figure. (I can’t remember who told me that) B^)
You can’t even watch those their private.
31st April works for most of the world.
Incidentally, I remember when it was 12:34 5/6/78. The point being ‘special’ numbers aren’t so uncommon.
It really doesn’t… :p
Any time you have a 31st of April in the western world is a very special day indeed.
I think its when Christmas and Easter is on the same Day :P
Oops, my bad, read it somewhere else and didn’t think it through. Bring back the French revolutionary decimal-ish calendar , I say.
Am I the only one disappointed at the lack of Rasperry Pi hacks today? ;)
I think some other Internet site covered them, Instructables? Adafruit?
it is 14 MAR 2015 or 03/14/2015. Why manipulate the date to fit an agenda? For most people, PI is 3.14 it happens every year. WHOOOOPIEEEEEEEE
Wow. I didn’t realize that standardized date formats had to be run by you before they could be used. In case this was before your time, the reason why the infamous “Y2K Bug” was even an issue is because of the use of the standard 2-digit year format in most of the computer software and hardware from the ’80’s and ’90’s. The rollover to the year 2000 was predicted to be problematic because much of the technology of the time used the 2-digit year format and couldn’t properly handle “00” as a date.
It turned out that very few devices were actually affected, but since that time it has been more common to see the 4-digit year format used. That doesn’t mean that the 2-digit format is in any way improper.
you said “very few devices were affected” by the y2k ‘bug’, do you happen to know how many and/or what they were? i was under the impression that nothing was affected by the y2k rollover, and it was a theory that was debunked as soon as it happened..
If you believe the Y2K problem was overblown, your impression is wrong. Like many, many people worldwide I worked on combing through and fixing Y2K date-problematic software in the late 90s, in my case it was financial software for a large savings organization.
Because of that massive amount of effort it was – as people had hoped for – a mitigated problem.
Yeah, just when COBOL programmers thought their lives were worthless, they became superstars!
Proper use of the international standard for the representation of dates and times, ISO 8601, would help to avoid confusion and errors. And not only in software. But this is rather off-topic on Pi-day.
But then, there wouldn’t be a Pi day, as there are only 12 months, not 14…
there wouldn’t be an “e” day or “mole’ day (10.23) either, life would be so dull…
“That doesn’t mean that the 2-digit format is in any way improper.”
Perhaps not, but cherry picking a certain format to make it, superficially, look like something else lies more in the realm of numerology. Surely you can understand that most people interested in the mathematics and science behind PI have little interest in the nonsense that is the pseudo-science of finding meaning in numbers that isn’t there?
Not as I’ve seen it, I know of at least one mathematician who LOVES Pi Day!
$ TZ=GMT date -d@3141592653 +’%F %T’
2069-07-21 00:37:33
theres no pi day in germany
3.1.41 at this day, a font “Kurrentschrift” was forbidden.
See you next year for Engineer’s Pi Day
+1
“Well, sorta of”
Correct me if im wrong but isnt “sorta” just another way of saying “sort of”? So “sort of of”???
Is this also poor grammar day? This article may be in the running for some of the worst copy editing on HAD.
“In the perspective of history, it can be used as a milestone to mark many different culture’s advancement of math and science.”
Using the singular culture with “many different” doesn’t make sense.
Should be “many different cultures’ ” (plural possessive) or “a culture’s” (referring to any particular culture).
“With out it, we’d never would have gone to the moon.”
we’d = we would,
So this is saying “Without it, we would never would have gone to the moon.”
“with out” -> without
“child hood” -> childhood
Get a grammar checker, or review Harbrace; Strunk and White; etc.
I don’t expect everyone to memorize at least 200 digits of PI like me. But if you’re writing an article about that topic you should at least be able to copy and paste the correct sequence of digits. Worst author ever. And don’t tell me you wanted to round up PI ! Idiot
Sheesh. Bad mood much?
You memorized 200 digits of PI? What a colossal waste of time. That’s time you could have been spending with loved ones, or at least doing something productive. And you call the author of this article an idiot for a simple math mistake?
Get over yourself already.
Ever?
bet happy poo day
“Worst author ever”
I suggest you don’t research Mein Kampf.
The only time you’d need to know it to that precision from memory is when entering it in software that can handle it. However at that point the software already has the constant built in.
And it seems more useful to remember it to maybe 10 digits max and spend the extra effort to memorize other constants that are of significance. Of which there are so many, the speed of light for instance, (Which apparently is widely rounded off from 299792458 m/s to 300000000 and yet often used in calculations that way.)
The least you could do is say what exactly is wrong. That said, it’s the ellipsis at the end that makes the figure wrong. Unlike you I didn’t memorize 200 digits. But after a concussion in my youth, I took great pains to remember up to this: 3.14159265358979… Now whenever I crash my bike, I take a moment to remember the 12 digits. The important thing is that the ellipsis is there to show that pi is irrational. If I were to round off, I would write the last few digits as 535898 and be done with it. Pi really must be shown as either rounded or irrational, so the mistake is in the combination.
I was rewarded today with cosmic humor. I $&*! you not, my entire office server farm died. Why is not nearly as important as WHEN :) 3-14-15, 9:27am.
As to the why, the utility company decided to let the magic smoke out a transformer.
I don’t think transformers have magic smoke, only small components like IC’s and such do. Transformers have regular smoke, and fire, and explosions.
What’s wrong with you man? Engineers can make anything cough up the blue smoke… or is that hippies? Never mind.
It was a great day for a birthday.
I’m no longer a Pi person, the next major Tau day is on the 28th of June 2031:).
Can’t wait for Tau day! I’m gonna party all the way around the clock, instead of just halfway around the clock.
Tau Manifesto is actually a quite interesting read: http://www.tauday.com/tau-manifesto
Thing is, While Tau is easier with 2D in lots of cases, but at higher dimensions it just makes things more complex.
So I think the Tau arguments always fall flat for me….
Though it does permit cute Pi day coincidences, the mm-dd-yy date format is even more monsterously boneheaded than daylight saving time, and only slightly less pigheaded than imperial measurement systems. Really, ISO8601, folks. http://xkcd.com/1179/
Middle-endianness for maximum confusion!
Yes I will never understand why countries use strange middle endian format
I really like that format when naming files/directories prefixed with that format then they are ordered by default in order of date in pretty much all major OS’es.
As with any time format since you’re using name sorting:
15/03/2015 will always be before 16/03/2015
03/15/2015 will always be before 03/16/2015
2015/03/15 will always be before 2015/03/16
even works with epoch.
Because elephants should be measured in grams, the age of your father in seconds, and SI doesn’t even recognize litres anymore… I know how long an inch, a span, a foot, a yard are by looking at my own body. Degrees closely match the daily rotation of the earth to the sun, it all applies pretty easily to me describing my environment.
“…SI doesn’t even recognize litres anymore”
They don’t? What’s a 1000 millilitres called then?
Ah, OK. It’s not defined as part of SI, but it’s acceptable to use with SI units.
The Palais de la découverte in Paris as a 707 digits PI display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp43OdtAAkM
Sorry wrong link, here the good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRuKh7dI_bs
An interesting idea: Pi has diminishing returns in regards to it’s numerical precision. Realistically it is only observable in nature to say the 30th something digit and only really useful for calculations at around 15 digits. We have plotted and intercept course to a comet, landed, and come back to Earth with only 15 digits. Finding the value of Pi to the 10 Trillionth digit is mostly novelty and not “useful” except in the pursuit of pure knowledge.
this true but only for small spaces. start using astronomical units and you are going to want that extra trillion digits.
With 39 decimal places you can work out the circumference of the entire universe with an error of less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Those extra trillion digits are not going to help you.
Oops, sorry, hit report by mistake.
Anyway, doesn’t that 39 digits assume the universe is finite, and that we can even see that far back. Besides, if the universe is infinite, then I could tell you the circumference without knowing any constants.
Okay wise guy, the KNOWN Universe! B^)
I believe its used to test errors in computer chips.
You can pick a few things, but I guess its a good property as something everyone can agree on its real value upto a precision with no ambiguity.
Why not 07/21/2069 00:37:33? It’s a nerdy holiday anyway so why not count seconds from Unix epoch? Last time this happened was in 1979.
It’s only pi day because Americans use an outdated way to write the date…
Yup, completely weird.
Americans be like “The 14th of March” and write it 03/14
English be like “March, the 14th” and write it 14/03
The world is upside down.
Did you know that we could have a Pi year? It would be seven months long and each month would be of different length: 31+ 41 + 59 + 26 + 53 +58 + 97 and the whole year would still be 365 days long.
whoa… that’s one I haven’t run across before. Cool!
You were asking for algorithms to “create PI”. We did iterative approximations for PI in school some many decades ago. One nice approximation I remember is this:
113355
One. One. Three. Three. Five. Five.
If you draw a line over 113, then drop the line between the two 3 and underline 355, you get a fraction:
___
113|355
——
turns into:
355
——
113
…. which approximates PI. Not to the last digit, mind you … but still the “visual representation” is one that I like.
Well … this commentary system obviously does not like ASCII art. How I miss the old days when fun was fun.
These rational represetation of PI are usefull when working with integer math on MCU. From least precise to more precise one can use: 22/7, 355/113, 52163/16604, etc
Well, today is only the ultimate pi day this century if you go with the “truncate” lifestyle paradigm. If you go with the “rounding”, then *NEXT* year is the big year, for 3/14/16.
Or use the hour, minute, and second as additional digits…
“There is 1 million digits of pi.” Good math. Bad grammar. Should be “There are 1 million digits of pi.”
“There are 1 million digits of pi.” Which would still be misleading, since pi has many more digits.
“Here are 1 million digits of pi.” or “There are 1 million digits of pi at the linked web page.”
Another chance next year, that is, if we round up to 3.1416…… But this is probably cursing in church.