MID-HUDSON – Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 and is embraced by math enthusiasts around the world. Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159.
NASA considers 3/14 to be of the utmost importance and credits a physicist with instituting the national observance. In 1988, a physicist at the San Francisco Exploratorium held what is thought to be the first official Pi Day celebration, which smartly included the consumption of fruit pies. Math teachers quickly realized the potential benefits of teaching students about pi while they ate pie, and it all caught on so much that in 2009, the U.S. Congress officially declared March 14 National Pi Day. NASA has suggestions for observing the day they call an “icon of nerd culture” that aids scientists, rocket scientists, teachers, and math students. The NASA tribute to Pi can be found here.
Pi is considered one of the most well-known mathematical constants. For any circle, the distance around the edge is a little more than three times the distance across.
Typing π into a calculator and pressing ENTER will yield the result 3.141592654, not because this value is exact, but because a calculator’s display is often limited to 10 digits. Pi is actually an irrational number (a decimal with no end and no repeating pattern) that is most often approximated with the decimal 3.14 or the fraction 227.
Pi has been calculated to more than 50 trillion digits beyond its decimal point. As an irrational and transcendental number, it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern. While only a handful of digits are needed for typical calculations, according to most math teachers, pi’s infinite nature makes it a fun challenge to memorize and to computationally calculate more and more digits.
According to Mometrix Test Preparation, Archimedes, a Greek mathematician, was the…
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