What’s Your Favorite Kind Of “Pi”?

Three hundred sixty four days of the year I’d probably tell you either key lime or pumpkin but today I let my brain do the talking instead of my stomach. Let’s talk math. It’s “Pi”. You know that funny looking symbol. Well today is "Pi" Day!

According to the website www.piday.org, “Pi, the Greek letter (see picture below), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14^th”.

Why March 14^th? The first three digits of the never-ending, never-repeating number is 3.14. Now do you remember Pi? How many consecutive digits do you remember?

To date the “Guinness Book of Records” has determined there are over 206 billion digits to Pi however in Japan researchers say the number is more like over one trillion numbers and counting. I wanted to illustrate what a trillion numbers of Pi looks like here but that might crash your computer so here is the first 500 numbers:

3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923

07816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609

550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930

381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923

460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520

920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941

511609330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799

627495673518857527248912279381830119491

Pi is still very popular amongst the math elites and in popular culture. Last Friday night Pi was featured in an episode of CSI-NY as the murderer, SPOILER ALERT, a high school girl, killer her best friend’s love interest. As she confessed her crime she noted they became best friends when they were little after competing in a contest to see how many consecutive numbers of Pi could be recited by memory. They tied.

Now if you were expecting some fancy math lesson from me on the uses of Pi, in the words of just about all my Italian relatives, “fuhgeddaboudit”. I’m simply in it for the celebration. Tonight I’m having key lime pie.