Pi is a remarkable number and represents, in the collective mind, the field of mathematics better than any other number. Today is March 14 (or 3/14 when written in the generally used American date format), a day that is celebrated by many as Pi Day. This date is important not so much because we are obsessed with a number, however irrational that may be, but rather because it brings mathematics and science into the spotlight – a place where these areas of human understanding should truly be more often.
I wrote about this event last year when a House Resolution was passed in favor of recognizing National Pi Day. The world is changing, and I feel that we’re slowly starting to see greater mainstream acceptance of how mathematics plays a vital role in some many of major fields.
Deep down, even students who claim to hate mathematics are aware of its importance and relevance in today’s world. With the attention recent Pi Days have generated, it’s clear that this “holiday” is becoming more and more mainstream, and not something that’s limited to a bunch of math geeks like us.
A quick look at Twitter, reveals that “Happy Pi Day” is a trendy topic, with literally thousands of tweets mentioning it. Even Google decided to honor this day by dedicating one of their logos to the occasion.
Year after year, awareness about this day continues to rise, which I feel is absolutely great for mathematics in general. But let’s transcend politics for a moment and enjoy our geeky day. Happy Pi Day to all of you! Tomorrow I’ll post about the new page I’ve been preparing for a while. It took scores of research, brainstorming and writing, but it’s almost ready. See you soon.
Pi paraphernalia
Pi movie | Pi biography | Pi T-shirt | Spiral Pi T-shirt | PI To The 50th Decimal Tie
Happy Pi Day!
That’s really a good day to have a few beers…
It’s not only pi day, it’s also Einstein’s birthday. Which, in the USA, we’re celebrating by arranging a discontinuity in the fabric of space-time and jumping forward an hour in the 4th dimension.
Indeed, Neal, indeed. 🙂 I was tempted to mention Einstein’s birthday, but it didn’t quite fit into the original draft. I’m really glad you brought it up, thanks!
UCF had a lot of fun celebrating Pi day!
Well, it is nearly 8 years since I graduated with a Maths degree from the University of Leeds and despite it being a great achievement and looking good on my CV, I can honestly say it was the biggest waste of time ever. I ended up re-training as an Engineer over several years, earning a good wage and setting up several businesses – completely unrelated to Maths. So, the reason for this post is to say that Maths can be a great subject and can be made interesting with fantastic and seemingly unrelated applications, but when people go one step further to Uni, it can become meaningless and pathetic and students such as myself lose interest… Mathematicians celebrating Pi Day just reinforces non-mathematicians’ thoughts about the subject. You need to get some cool applications promoted for the subject, such as coding and how it allows secure transactions online with SSL, etc. get modern! The days of remembering the first 50,000 decimal places of Pi have been and gone. How boring. Make it interesting for people and show the applications early on… such as CFD for Motorsport.
Wanted to get that off my chest for a while…
Regards,
Promart
@ above :
All right its painfull to read that a maths graduate didnt understand its beauty.I am also a mathematics graduate and now a coder so just couldnt resist to write here.Tha applications you talked about are all gift from mathematics.So if you take all maths part out of those then nothing interested will remain .