Pi is one of the most important numbers in our universe. And one of the most fantastic thing about Pi is that the day that is celebrated as ‘Pi Day’ is 14th March or 3/14 which resembles 3.14.
Another fun fact, the official celebration of Pi Day begins at 1.59 PM to make it appropriately 3.14159 when the date and time are combined. To celebrate this extraordinary number, let’s look at some fantastic facts you may not have known about ‘Pi’.
- In the year 1988, physicist Larry Shaw started Pi Day at San Francisco’s Exploration. In view of celebrating the most important mathematical number and mathematics as a subject in general. And nearly 20 years later, the U.S. House of Representative passed a resolution to recognize Pi Day in the year 2009.
- Pi has been around for centuries but was not incorporated into the Greek letter until the 1700s. In 1706, Philologist William Jones started using the ‘π’ symbol to represent Pi. But he was not the one who popularized Pi. Mathematician Leonhard Euler is responsible for popularizing Pi.
- Pi is infinite, and it cannot be calculated. It is often defined as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Or, 3.14 approximately.
- There are 99,959 zeros, 99,758 ones, 100,026 twos,100,229 threes, 100,230 fourss, 100,359 fives, 99,548 sixes, 99,800 sevens, 99,985 eights, and 100,106 nines in the first million decimal places of Pi.
- It is indicated through The Rhind Papyrus (c. 1650 B.C.), that Eqyptians made the first attempt to calculate Pi by “squaring the circle”. In simple terms, they tried to measure the diameter of a circle by building a square inside a circle.
- In the year 2015, Rajveer Meena recited 70,000 decimal places of Pi, in 10 hours. He holds the record for reciting the most number of decimal places of Pi.
- Emma Iwao, a Google employee, holds the record for calculating the Pi. She worked for four months and calculated Pi to 31.4 million digits.
- According to ‘History Today’, before Pi was associated with symbol π, mathematicians used a Latin phrase to describe it. That phrase was, ‘quantitas in quam cum multiflicetur diameter, proveniet circumferencia’ this was found in old math books. The rough translation of the words is, ‘the quantity which, when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference’.
- Pi is an essential factor to perform calculations in Maths, Engineering, Physics, and Space Exploration.
The importance of Pi cannot be expressed in a few words, but it can be felt whenever you need to perform a complex calculation.
