Yesterday was Pi Day. What is the news of the Pi Day events? Pizza Hut had free pies. Pizza pies. NASA had a Pi Day Challenge. An Ann Arbor boy can recite 1,300 Pi digits. I wonder how long that takes? It doesn't say, but there's a video of the boy in the corner of the news article. But some other person who is 6 years old memorized 1200 digits and it took 8 minutes.
And how long would it take to recite all of pi? Well, that's a silly question, as we now that pi never ends and it never repeats itself. the first 62.8 trillion digits have been computer by computers and if one digit is said every second, it would take 2,000,000 years to recite all 62 plus trillion.
There follows many people who have recited pi to various numbers of digits. 1,200 is a common choice.
Here's that butterfly from yesterday with a watercolour treatment.
Would you like a full year of fun holidays, silly and funny days?
Today is International Sloth Day. Sunday October 22nd is Caps Lock Day. There are many sites claiming to have funny days - for example, daysoftheyear.com says that today is Information Overload Day. Most of the sites have today as Brandied Fruit Day.
I wanted to find a really "Special" Day and Huffington Post delivered on this:
"That's the case with Pi Day, which commemorates the mathematical constant 3.14 (ad infinitum) on March 14 (3/14).
Pi Day was inaugurated in 1988 by Larry Shaw at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where he worked as a physicist before his retirement.
"Larry has a wonderful, quirky sense, and he realized that March 14 was 3/14, and we could celebrate the transcendental number pi," says Ron Hipschman, an educator at Exploratorium. "Then his daughter realized it was also Einstein's birthday."
Pi, which expresses the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is an irrational number approximated by Archimedes and other mathematicians going back more than two thousand years ago.
For scientists of all stripes who deal with formulas, pi has an almost magical power. It has an infinite number of digits that never repeat in any kind of pattern. Computer calculations so far have taken it out to about 30 trillion digits and counting.
"The normal way we celebrate Pi Day is we do all kinds of pi- and circular-related events at the Exploratorium," says Hipschman, who helps co-ordinate the day's activities. Over the years, those events have included pizza-pie tossing contests, pie fights and pi digit memorization recitals, as in 3.14159 ... and onwards.
A Pi Shrine was built at the top of a cylindrical building on the grounds of the interactive science museum and a brass plaque was installed honouring the number.
"At 1:59, we have a pi procession where everybody carries a digital pi on a pie plate attached to a beater stick through the Exploratorium, up to the Pi Shrine, where we circumambulate the Pi Shrine 3.14 times while singing 'Happy Birthday' to Albert Einstein," he says.
"And then we eat pie!"
These two buildings are from a visit to Kingston last August.
