Pies R round, cakes R Square

[953 nut 57,532]

 

Pi Day is on March 14, and any day that combines fun, education, and pie is a day worth celebrating! Pi, also known by the Greek letter “π,” is a constant value used in math that represents the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter, which is just about 3.14….15…9265359… (and so on). Not only that, but the fourteenth of March is also Albert Einstein’s birthday, so all together it’s nothing short of a mathematician’s delight.

To learn about pi, we need to go back a few thousand years and learn about this elusive number. The value of pi was first calculated by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world.

However, it was first baptized with the Greek letter as its name when William Oughtred called it as such in his works dating back to 1647, later embraced by the scientific community when Leonhard Euler used the symbol in 1737.

But how did Pi Day end up in a country-wide phenomenon? For that, we need to travel to the Exploratorium in 1988 San Francisco, where it was thought up by physicist Larry Shaw.

Shaw linked March 14 with the first digits of pi (3.14) in order to organize a special day to bond the Exploratorium staff together, where he offered fruit pies and tea to everyone starting at 1:59 pm, the following three digits of the value. A few years later, after Larry’s daughter, Sara, remarked that the special date was also the birthday of Albert Einstein, they started celebrating the life of the world-famous scientist.

Pi Day became an annual Exploratorium tradition that still goes on today, and it didn’t take long for the idea to grow exponentially, hitting a peak on March 12, 2009, when the U.S Congress declared it a national holiday.

 

 

[Pullstart 64,382]

 

[SylvanLakeWH 27,211]

 

 

[stevasaurus 23,041]

(x * y) / (g *k) +(3.14 x 2r) = why the chicken crossed the road  

[adsm08 2,556]

I brought it up as a joke in our morning meeting today and we ended up with pizza for lunch.

[Mickwhitt 4,964]

As a kid I never saw the point of maths, why do you call it math? It's plural, mathematics,  you wouldn't say I'm at college studying mathematic, would you. Small point but you chaps really do make a mess of your mother tongue you know. 

But as I grew older I saw the amazing power of numbers and what could be achieved by cunning calculations. 

A big part of my job as a crash detective involved using maths to calculate the speed of vehicles with a range of formulae, some involved Pi when dealing with non linear trajectory. Very basic maths compared to some calculations. 

It was that work that gave me an appreciation for the beauty of Pi. How did that old Greek guy come up with 3.14159..... did he look at his circular garden and think "that's odd, it takes me this long to walk round the edge of it and only this long to walk straight across from side to side. I wonder what the difference is? Oh I see, it 3.14159 times longer to go all the way round."

Bloody marvellous! 

And pythagorus, what a guy! Coming up with the relationship of sides in a right angle triangle. Pure genius.

Not forgetting that dude who triggered the nometry... SOH CAH TOA was it really silly old Harry who caught a herring trawling off America? 

Maths is wonderful and amazing and I can't believe not one teacher was able to enthuse me with the beauty of it until I needed to work out the speed of a car hitting a pedestrian, based solely on the distance they were thrown by the car and the coefficient of friction between a body and the road surface, with a bit of gravity thrown in. 

 

 

[Handy Don 13,260]

What sparked me initially were the commutative and distributive properties--the symmetry and universality.

Geometric constructions and proofs were like catnip.

But the real highlight was when an excellent teacher introduced the unit circle in trigonometry--THAT was a real revelation. Some old horse caught another horse taking oats away.

A couple of years ago I spent a day on the Greek island of Samos, Pythagorus’ home. Amid all the typical beautiful scenes were many places where right triangles were used as a decorative motive. 

Edited March 16 by Handy Don