Can You Use Pi To Find The Height Of An Elephant

Past Anupum Pant

"International" Pi day?

Today is pi 24-hour interval. Pi day is celebrated on March 14 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (March xiv is 3/14) at 1:59 PST which is 3.14159.

Since pi day is today's date written in the mm.dd (03.xiv) format, it could non be a pi day for virtually of you lot because dd.mm is the format used for writing dates in virtually countries around the world. In fact, those countries where more than than half of the world's population resides, will never have a pi day because you know, nosotros can't have a 14^th month! Pi twenty-four hour period is a valid celebration for people living only in the United States (including the 49^th and northernmost state, Alaska and Hawaii of course) and Belize. Everywhere else people get cipher today?

date format map — Only the regal parts in the map employ the mm.dd.yy format to write dates

Firstly, there is always the pi approximation day, which is celebrated on 22nd July (22/vii) and uses the dd.mm format. Talking about March 14th, there is much more to pi mean solar day than just the date format itself. Let'due south see…

Birthdays

I know, Eugene Cernan – The NASA astronaut who was the last human being on the moon, and the one you can hear speaking in a popular Daft Punk Track – is one famous man who was born on pi day, 79 years from at present, is an American also.

But judge what? Albert Einstein, one of the most genius men of recent times, was born on pi day too. He was a High german built-in physicist (He did live in the US for more than than 15 years and in fact, even took his last breath in New Jersey)

pi day birthdays — Left to Correct: Albert Einstein, Gene Cernan and the commander of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, have their birthdays on March fourteen, Pi Day.

And so, y'all see there is a little bit of pi 24-hour interval for every i effectually the earth today. It is not but an American thing. Now moving on the most amazing things nigh pi.

Irrational pi

Firstly, pi, different what we all are taught in school, isn't 22/seven. 22 divided past 7 is only an approximation of pi – it is merely 99.95975% accurate. Every bit we all know, pi is actually the ratio of a circumvolve's circumference to its diameter. A slightly ameliorate approximation of pi would exist 104348/33215 – which is 99.99999998944% accurate. Just, since it is an irrational number, information technology can never be written in the form of a fraction.

Exact Value

The exact value of pi is impossible to write in digits because the number of digits needed to write information technology would be space and could never be fit inside the known universe.

To call back of it in another way, if you divided the whole universe into the smallest possible volumes (plank volume), you'd end up with a heed bogglingly large number of volumes. Suppose yous started writing the digits of pi inside these lilliputian volumes, yous'd finish upwardly the universe and would be still left with infinite more than digits to write.

The Digits of Pi

The latest record for the maximum number of known digits of pi is 12.1 Trillion digits (December 28, 2013), equally calculated by Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo. They have run out of disk infinite to store more numbers. Hither you can have a look at the first 100,000 digits of pi. And One million digits, if y'all demand more than that.

In these first one 1000000 digits, the sequence 12345 occurs 8 times!

The Feynman Bespeak: If y'all'd like to hear what pie would sound like if you mapped a couple of pleasant sounding notes to each of the digits of pi, endeavour listening to this. If you lot kept listening for a while and made it till the 762th digit, you'd hear a serial of (6 of them) high frequency notes (the ones mapped to the digit nine) that get played continuously. This place in the digits of pi is called the Feynman betoken where six 9s occur one afterward another. Isn't information technology incredible for six same numbers to be in that location consecutively in a random irrational number!

The Feynman point – series of six consecutive 9s highlighted in carmine.

Practically useful pi

Pi can be used in real life to make a couple of things easier. For example, if yous were to find the size of your hat (usually measured in diameters), you'd accept a difficult time measuring the bore of your head. This is what you can do to get a good approximation:
Measure the circumference of your head and divide it past π.

Another one trick is used by forest guards: To estimate the peak of an elephant the Diameter of an elephant's human foot is multiplied by two π.

Pi Jokes, facts and Coincidences

It is an impressive coincidence that three.xiv if horizontally flipped, looks like the give-and-take "Pie". You tin can bank check this in the mirror.

Another one is that, the 16th Greek letter is 'Pi' and the 16th letter in the English alphabet is 'P'.
The famous comedian John Evans in one case made a joke: "What do you become if you divide the circumference of a jack-o'-lantern past its diameter? Pumpkin π.

There is a cologne named pi and is sold with the following marketing mantra: "highlighting the sexual entreatment of intelligent and visionary men."
The height of the Great Pyramid of Giza multiplied past ii π is equal to the perimeter of its base.
The 90841th place in pi is 122189 – which is besides my nascency date in the mmddyy format. Discover yours here and tell me in the comments below.

Download the PiDay wallpaper here.

Practise share with me in the comments, other facts virtually pi you know and I haven't covered them here.

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