Since the numeric abbreviation of March 14th is 3.14 – it’s known as “Pi day” among the nerds. (Nerds in Europe probably don’t get it, since they tend to put the digit of the day of the month first – so they would be celebrating 14.03 day today… which simply isn’t as much fun…)
Happy â day!
Here are some things you can do for fun on Pi day:
- Search for numbers in the first few billion digits of Pi at this website (it does the searchign for you, it doesn’t just load a big page of numbers… don’t worry.)
We are going to have a contest here to see who has the following numbers earliest in the Pi sequence:- Date of Birth (mmddyy format)
- Social Security Number. (xxxyyzzzz format)
- Credit card number (xxxxyyyyxxxxyyyyxxxx format)
- PIN that you commonly use to access stuff (xxxx digit format)
- Marvel at the man who figured out a way to calculate the n’th digit of Ï independent of the (n-1) digits (this is a big deal… begging the question: is Pi really random?)
- Be amazed at how amazinlgy crappy this one government-run Pi search page is. (If you can get it to actually say anything except for “invalid string format request…” you win!)
- Google around for funny pages dealing with Pi… post them in the comments here
In case you were wondering how to post your results for the “contest”: Don’t post the actual number… just the index that it is in Pi… If your whole credit card number isn’t found – just post the index of each 4 digit chunk of it… Oh, and the index of the 3 digit number on the back, and the index of the 4 digit zip code to which the statement is mailed each month…
In case you didn’t figure it out… I was kidding. Don’t post that information anywhere on the web for reasons that should be obvious. If these reasons aren’t obvious, please disconnect your computer from the internet right now for your own protection.
I guess everybody was too busy celebrating Pi day to comment. I hope you are not all hung over tomorrow!
Just imagine how much celebrating there must have been in 1592. Or 1915.
You know that the math world was in turmoil when they first discovered that not all numbers were rational. This of course happened a very long time ago (the ancient Greeks I believe). It’s fairly easy to show, for example, that sqrt(2) is irrational, which comes up in geometry as the hypotenuse of a 45 degree right triangle with unit leg lengths.
Richard Feynman says (in his books) that whenever he sees pi in an equation he always looks for the circle. He believes you can always find it (as I would expect), but it’s not always obvious.
Ryan, if you ever want a fun conversation about countable and uncountable set let me know.
Look at the interesting conversation that pi brings about.
How ironic. I actually finished reading the book, “Life of Pi” yesterday…and I didn’t even put the two together. Its more than coincidence.