First things first, Happy Pi Day. Huzzah! Please do commence with the celebrating and the carousing.
So why is this Pi Day special? Well, here’s the first 9 digits of Pi (9 digits past the decimal):
3.141592653
In the US, this translates to March 14th, 2015 (3.141592653). At 9:26 and 53 seconds, which occurs both this morning and tonight, we’ll match all 10 digits. And that only happens once a century.
And just to embrace the math geekery further, adding more digits to the analysis only impacts the precision of the 53 seconds. Here are the first 50 digits of Pi:
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
As you can see, Pi skews closer to 9:26:54, so if you are a rounder, that’s the moment to pop that bottle of champagne.
That’s not really kosher, conveniently dropping two digits of the year to make it fit. Pi would need to resolve to 3.142015… for this to really be a thing. Use all the numbers, or none. Math isn’t a buffet line 🙂
It’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday, so huzzah!
Meh.
Well we missed it back in 1592, so this is the next best thing.
(And since it’s pi day only in the American date format, nobody knew it the first time)
If it happens twice today, it happens more than once per century.
CowPi – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1hYhU2wLys
but 3.14.15 is a perfectly legitimate expression of the date.
don’t be stealin’ our thunder.
/wetblanket
Except pretty much the ONLY place dates are read (incorrectly) like that (month/day/year), is the USA. So it’s all made up nonsense, sorry.
Only in the USA. Everywhere else it would be 14.3.15 or 15.3.14
And then there is the whole problem of whether it’s “3” or “03” since the month is not the first character.
Sure, as long as you don’t see any difference between, oh, 1715 and 2015. What information could those extra two digits possibly convey? All years that end in “15” are the same, right?
Digits are referred to as having levels of significance for a reason: Mainly, because they are significant.
And here, a little something for those of you who remember Warrant:
And, why no mention of Tao day? The argument that Tao is so much more logical than Pi anyway.
On relevant in Gregorian Calendar (since 1582)
using Hindu Numerals (decimal) passed down by Muslims to West
Which were outlawed by Church until Muslim traders were beating Italian trader in Italy.
and US calendar format.
some caveat.
In Europe Pi Day would have to fall On July 22 (22/7).
Canada, too.
Actually not. Many people using Microsoft’s and Apple’s computer systems are inadvertently forced to use the American date system, and many more don’t know any better as a result of the pervasiveness of US computers and US software, but the only country that “officially” uses anything but the original (day/month/year) is the USA.
Probably the US will win in the end. British English spell checking was broken with the release of Yosemite for instance but here we are on 10.10.02 already and Apple hasn’t even acknowledged the bug yet let alone fixed it.
I heard MIT sent out acceptance emails for next Fall at that moment.
31st of April in the rest of the world. Oh darn…