Today is March 14th, or Pi Day because 3.14 is March 14th rendered in month.day date format. A very slightly better way to celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is July 22nd, or 22/7 written in day/month order, a fractional approximation of pi that’s been used for thousands of years and is a better fit than 3.14. Celebrating Pi Day on July 22nd also has the advantage of eschewing middle-endian date formatting.
But Pi Day is completely wrong. We should be celebrating Tau Day, to celebrate the ratio of the circumference to the radius instead of the diameter. That’s June 28th, or 6.283185…. Nonetheless, today is Pi Day and in the absence of something truly new and insightful — we’re still waiting for someone to implement a spigot algorithm in 6502 assembly, by the way — this is a fantastic opportunity to discuss something tangentially related to pi, the history of mathematics, and the idea that human knowledge builds upon itself in an immense genealogy stretching back to the beginning of history.
This is our Pi Day article, but instead of complaining about date formats, or Tau, we’re going to do something different. This is how you approximate pi with the Monte Carlo method, and how anyone who can count to a million can get a better approximation of one the fundamental constants of the Universe than Archimedes.
Continue reading “Archimedes Would Have Known Better If He Could Count To A Million”
