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Happy Pi Day 2007!

Doctor Q

Doctor Q

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Original poster
Staff member
Sep 19, 2002
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Los Angeles
I've been sitting here for hours, doing nothing but watch the clock, as the hands slowly moved toward midnight Pacific time. I was waiting for the start of the biggest event of the year, and now it has arrived.

:D It's Pi Day! :D

Yes, when it's 3.14 on the calendar, we math geeks come out to celebrate, and there will be a fleeting (infinitesimal, in fact) moment of happiness when the time reaches 15.926... hours past midnight (just before 4pm). We each observe this wonderful holiday in our local time zone, for the Grand Pi plays no favorites, despite being irrational.

Unless you are deep in transcendental number meditation, you might enjoy these pi-ish diversions:

Enjoy prose about pi within 22/7 circles!

Read poems with word lengths matching the digits of pi!

Splash on some Pi cologne for men!

Listen to "Pi" ([playlistId=159504308&s=143441&i=159504348]iTunes link[/playlistId]), a song by Kate Bush with incorrect pi-based lyrics! Or is there actually a hidden meaning?

For those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area, celebrate Pi Day at the Exploratorium! Maybe you'll get some pi-zza!

And if you just want to sit back and enjoy the fun, I'm pretty sure that this chair I spotted at Staples has a pi symbol on the backrest!
 
Doctor Q said:
I've been sitting here for hours, doing nothing but watch the clock, as the hands slowly moved toward midnight Pacific time. I was waiting for the start of the biggest event of the year, and now it has arrived.

:D It's Pi Day! :D
Click to expand...

Q has been circling, just waiting for this moment. I'll bet you 22:7 he read "The Life of Pi" while waiting.

Amazing how circumspect he has been, waiting for this day to come round.

Hang in there, Q, less than 2 hours to go until 1:59:26 AM

Me, I was going to celebrate Golden Mean Day, but then I realized I was mean pretty much every day of the year, so it was irrational.
 
There are already too many numbers and too many mathy jokes in this thread. My head hurts. :eek:
 
Well you missed L33T day yesterday. 13/03/07 shortened to 13/3/7. I only found out this morning and was disappointed :mad: But happy ? day to all!!!
 
Pi is one of the most interesting numbers in math ever. I just really want to know if Pi is finite or infinite. The billionth digit of Pi is 9, perhaps that could be the last number of Pi. I thought Pi was infinite but now I am not so sure.
 
nazmac21 said:
Pi is one of the most interesting numbers in math ever. I just really want to know if Pi is finite or infinite. The billionth digit of Pi is 9, perhaps that could be the last number of Pi. I thought Pi was infinite but now I am not so sure.
Click to expand...

What? I'm so confused by your post I don't even know where to begin. Sure, the billionth digit of Pi is 9, but Pi could end in any number 1-9...
 
Doctor Q said:
It's a common misstatement when people say that pi is infinite. In fact, pi is not infinite.

Would anyone like to explain why?
Click to expand...

I wanna give it a shot, I may be way off base.
But it's an integral, right? So it may have an eventually repeating number of digits, but it's not an infinite number? Yes, no? Maybe?
 
I like the piX application. It couldn't handle 1x10^10 digits of pi though. The application crashed
 
Doctor Q said:
It's a common misstatement when people say that pi is infinite. In fact, pi is not infinite.

Would anyone like to explain why?
Click to expand...

My guess would be the semantics.

Pi, while containing an infinite number of decimal digits is significantly less than infinity. Some can even prove that it is less than 3.2.
 
atszyman said:
My guess would be the semantics.

Pi, while containing an infinite number of decimal digits is significantly less than infinity. Some can even prove that it is less than 3.2.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's correct. An infinite number would be a number larger than any specific numeric value. For example, the number of integers is an infinite number. Some infinite numbers have been assigned names, such as "Aleph-null" for the number of natural numbers (which equals the number of integers) and C for the number of real numbers. They are called cardinalities.

Since pi is between 3 and 4, it's certainly not infinite.

What people usually mean when they say that pi is infinite is that the decimal representation of pi (or the representation in any other base, for that matter) is an infinite sequence of digits. Since pi is irrational (not the ratio of any two integers), it can't have a finite representation as a decimal number. Proof: If the sequence of digits ever stopped, you could write pi as those digits over some power of ten, which would be a rational number.

Even rational numbers can have infinite representations. The number 22/7 (three and one seventh) is certainly rational, but it too has an infinite decimal representation: 3.142857 142857 142857 ...

I know that the 22/7 sequence never ends because I computed it all day yesterday, writing the digits on paper, and buying more and more paper from a bulk paper supply company. They told me they had to clear-cut hundreds of thousands of acres of forest to try to keep me supplied with paper, but I still never came to the end of the decimal sequence. When they ran out of forests, I had to stop. So that's clearly a mathematical proof that 22/7 has an infinite decimal representation.
 
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