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Today is Pi Day -- 03/14/02
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Today is Pi Day -- yeah, that's π Day -- that magic number that you learned about in math class. As a fraction it's 22/7... but 22 divided by 7 gives a result that just goes on and on and on.... 3.14159...

Today is Pi Day -- March 14th -- and math teachers are celebrating it. Yes, I am married to a math teacher and she is celebrating Pi Day today. To be more specific, she is kicking off the celebration at 1:59 this afternoon. (3.14159... etc. 1:59 on 3/14) Students are bringing in pies to be eaten as part of the celebration. (Nancy baked two large circular brownies in pie tins last night, just to be sure there would be sufficient pies to go around -- eighth-graders can consume vast amounts of food.)

The Exploratorium hosts a Pi Page -- but many of their links to Pi sites are broken.

Just in case you were curious, here's a page with the value of Pi carried out to 50,000 decimal places.

I found the following definition of π -- [which I found quoted on another page where it was attributed to "Godling's Glossary" -- but when I followed the URL so that I could link directly to it I got "Forbidden You don't have permission to access /Glossary/ on this server." so all I can say is it should be somewhere on www.davekrieger.net but you may not be able to reach it.]
A number, represented by said letter, expressing the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of pi has been calculated to many millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not smooth. Nature herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when they get sufficiently small, as Prof. Heisenberg has pointedout. However, the continued extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.


Hope you have a good Pi Day.

Note: that ampersand pi semicolon is supposed to be the code to produce the Greek letter pi -- it works in some browsers and doesn't in others.



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