Happy Pi Day!

Every year, around March 14, the world gathers as one to celebrate, what some consider, one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the ancient world... the discovery of the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference.

Wow. When you put it like that, it doesn't sound so great.

Regardless, it is what it is.

And if anyone has taken very much math in life, Pi pops up pretty regularly. So much so, that some folks consider it almost like a mystical thing.

It's been surmised that should we make contact with any alien civilization out there, then we'd want to show them Pi... just to prove we're not morons. The assumption being that any aliens would recognize it for what it is.

Carl Sagan, it his wonderful book, Contact (I also said this was one of my favorite movies of all time a few weeks ago), wrote it into his novel as mystical thing... going so far as to having the aliens of his book ponder on it. Because if you work it out far enough, eventually (in the book, not real life), a pattern emerges. Not just a pattern, but what looks like a message. Embedded right there in the very fabric of mathematics is a message - from God? Some math obsessed ancient aliens who wrote codes all over the universe... is it a warning? What is it?

Getting back to math though, I'm no genius, really. Please don't act too shocked about that. But, when I was in college I did enter into a few math competitions. Nothing larger than a regional sort of thing... maybe 8 or 9 institutes of higher learning would send students to compete and we'd all be given problems and told to we have figure them out.

I did okay doing those. Well enough to get shiny certificates to put on my wall and enough money in winnings to buy a textbook or two. Of course, again, that's small potatoes. More than anything, it convinces me that I'm surrounded by idiots, not that I'm smart.

The point to all that, is that in doing all that math, I couldn't help but notice that Pi didn't come up that often when working through things. 2Pi came up ALL the time... so many formula for figuring out whatever it was I was trying to do involved me using 2Pi, not Pi. I recall wishing that 2Pi was a thing.

Turns out, it is. Tau <-- check that link (the ratio of the radius to the circumference) is 2Pi... 6.28...(instead of 3.14). It's a movement to try to get Pi to be replaced in mathematics by Tau, which will help simplify doing math tremendously (again, follow the link if your interested).

So, I don't have any love for Pi, really. Except that I did have to study it in school, some. Regardless, I was at work a few weeks ago and it came out that I know Pi out to... I wasn't sure, but I guessed 20 digits or so. Apparently, that was met with some skepticism, which seems weird to me because, seriously, is that something anyone would really brag about? I mean, if I were in a bar with some nerdy folks that might impress somebody, but not really, because I'd guess that if you don't know it out to 50 places or so, no real Pi nerd will take you as serious about the topic.

3.14159265358979323846264338327
(I didn't take the pic either)

But...whatever. I was handed a marker and directed to a whiteboard. Where I managed to produce the hard to see string of digits to the right of the screen with three or four onlookers. I didn't bother to check to see if I was right (someone else said they did) but I counted out 29 digits before I ran out of steam. So, despite myself. I did feel a small flush of satisfaction as it managed to get some looks of impressment. After all, until the early 17th century, no one in the world had calculated Pi out as far (another time travel tip).

That feeling quickly passed as people starting asking me why I know Pi like I did. I don't have an answer for that. It just got in my head somewhere.

So happy Pi day people!