Happy Monday. Today's blog assignment for today is to write everything we know about pi. This is because pi day, or March 14, is coming up soon, on Thursday.
Pi is the name of a Greek letter that is given to a very famous irrational number. The number can be expressed as an improper fraction 7/22, or as a decimal that is very long but is typically shortened to 3.14. The actual pi decimal has more than a million places and is non-terminating, or goes on forever.
Pi is fun to recite, but it can also be useful outside of school. Architects and civil engineers use pi to find the circumference of an object. They use only 3.14 since pi goes on endlessly. This is why there is no such thing as a perfect circle, only very close optical illusions. In this way pi is sort of like a mathematical paradox. Like I said previously, pi is represented as the Greek letter of the same name. This is what it looks like.
Click image to enlarge
We celebrate Pi Day on March 14 because in American dating, it looks like 3/14. If we were to properly use pi's fraction form, the day would be celebrated on 22/7, but there is no 22nd month! The actual exact Pi Day, when the date matches the places in the number, will be on March 14, 2015 at a certain time in the morning (the 9:00 hour). I don't know pi to very many places, but a lot of people memorize it for fun and around the country and world pi-reciting contests are held. Kind of a useless skill to learn, but it would be fun to show people, I imagine.
RSS Feed