On the January 11, 2008 episode of JEOPARDY!, the $600 clue in the category Math Rocks was this:
Kate Bush sang over 100 digits about this symbol, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The question makes me hungry already.
Happy π Day!
I must admit a certain fascination with other people’s fascination with what I learned in high school as 22/7, but which is a lot more precise than that, such as
this one:
or especially this one, which lets me know that “the string 19530307 occurs at position 20,376,164 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.” Of course, it does.
Personally, I’ve never bothered to learn pi past the fifth digit after the decimal (3.14159), because then I’d have to worry about rounding errors. I didn’t know that definition of π was implied in the Bible, though with all that calculating of the cubits, I should have guessed.
No, I’ve never seen the movie.
“In celebration of the day, feel free to take a moment to contemplate and enjoy the mathematics in nature (or just draw a circle).” (Stolen from my friend Annie, as was the title of the piece.)
ROG