Number geeks—and pie aficionados—around the world have an excuse to indulge themselves today PiDay
Number geeks—and pie aficionados—around the world have an excuse to indulge themselves today. It’s Pi Day, when the calendar reflects one of the world’s most important mathematical constants.
Pi is a circle's circumference—the distance around it—divided by its diameter, or the distance through its center. The relationship holds no matter the size of the circle: The rim of a soup can and a planet's equator both yield a ratio of pi. Ron Hipschman at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Museum staff held the first Pi Day celebration in 1988 by eating pie, and have carried on the tradition every year since, adding a Pi Day"shrine" and a procession.
"Pi is interesting because it goes on forever [and its sequence] never repeats," Hipschman says. That's probably part of the reason why people are so enamored of it, he adds.People have known about this number for thousands of years—it even shows up in the Bible. And the fascination cuts across cultures. The Babylonians, ancient Greeks, and even the Chinese have tried their hand at calculating ever more accurate versions of pi.of pi in 250 B.C.
Through the years, people have calculated pi to greater accuracy. But the hunt for even more decimal places really got cracking with the development of computers. Two American mathematicians calculated pi out to 1,120 digits in 1949 using a desk calculator. Currently, pi has been calculated out to 13.3 trillion decimal places, Hipschman says.
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