On this Pi Day, the 14th of March, let me share some thoughts which I long sought to pen down for quite some time. Pi is transcendal, but it's completely rational and worthy to celebrate today's date on this irrational number. Remember, the dialogs in the movie The Matrix or by the villain of the Bond movie Spectre?
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."
I remember in a course of Quantitative Biology, on the MIT MOOC platform and edX, renowned Professor Eric Lander also referred to this famous dialog "Matrix is everywhere" drawing on the movie quote when he was telling us about matrix calculations. This omnipresence also applies to pi too!
We find that somehow, pi permeates to almost all
aspects of our life: arts, geometrical figures, all the sounds around
us, mathematics, physics, computer science, electronics, astrophysics, nuclear
spin, DNA, time and space, galaxies, the universe and so on. You name it, you
have it there!
Now let me clarify, why today is pi day. The value of Pi, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle; is close to about 3.14 [or 22/7, pi approximation day.] Thus, the 14th of March (3.14) and 22nd July (22/7) are called pi day and pi approximation day respectively. Both are actually only approximations as we can only get near it, never quite reaching it.
BTW, did you notice that the
favicon of my Blog is also pi (π). Naturally today's Google doodle also honours this
date.
Another important event that occurred on this day is Albert Einstein's
birthday.
Did you know:
NASA requires only 16 digits of pi to precisely calculate distances for orbiting spacecraft and only about 39 digits to calculate the circumference of the visible universe? While NASA may not require more digits of pi, computer scientists use many digits of pi to check the processing power of computers.
People can memorize the value of pi, by learning some mnemonics such as this. The term for such type of encoded writing is “pilish. In most cases the writers are anonymous. “May I draw a circle?” (3.1416, an approximate pi), “May I have a large container of coffee?” (3.1415926), and “May I have a large container of coffee, sugar and cream?” (3.1415926535). Some also recite the values of pi in such events celebrating the Pi Day. Let’s join the celebration by making and eating pies, as is done in many parts of the world. Now, for a bit of fun: what’s your opinion about pi?
Mine: An opinion without pi just stinks! Now over to the ONION router…
Next, I will write an article on the use of ubiquitous pi in
physiology and medicine.
