Ten random facts about pi
March 14, 2007 by Florine
- It’s Pi-day today!
- Maybe they were preparing festivities… anyway, lately the number one search term for people coming to Qulog is Pi Song.
- As a result, the stats on that post have gone up from maybe four every day to over
yesterday!
- There are
seconds in a year (error is less than a percent).
- You can ‘measure’
by repeatedly dropping a needle onto a ruled surface. It’s not a very practical way, but I like it anyway.
- Somewhere in the digits of
- A circle with diameter 1 has circumference
.
- During a lecture on quantum field theory, Gerard ‘t Hooft once joked that he used the ’small circle approximation’:
.
- There are more pi-songs than just the one I wrote about last year.
- Oh, I almost forget:
, followed by a lot of digits I don’t remember…
Your birthday (and many other strings of numbers) can be found in pi’s digits via the Pi search page: http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery.html
Regarding yours, the answer this page returns is:
“The string ******** [censored] occurs at position 7,411,604 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.
The string and surrounding digits:
90873298712148346809 ******** 02253004005621775580 [censored again]”
Though censored, there is sufficient information available to retrieve your date of birth…
:-)
Thanks for the censoring!
But is is only Pi-day in the usa, right? ;-)
By the way, surace -> surface.
My favourite fact about Pi is that it’s a transcendental number.
It made my A5 class laugh out loud when I told them about pi day. We, the chemists, also have a day called Mole Day. It’s either on June 2 (6/02) from 10.23 AM to 10.23 PM, or on October 23 (10/23), from 6:02 AM to 6:02 PM.
@ Wilfred: Thanks for pointing out the typo. Yes, it’s only Pi-day in the US, and then only for the nerds who like this sort of thing.
@ Machiel: Mole day… that’s a nice one, too. There must be a lot more possibilities….
day? 1st of May (5th of Jan in the USA), 10:34 or something (maybe 9:26, because that’s 10:(-34)?).
Thanks for the article. This is way of the mark…but I was delighted to know that my sur-name has a day reserved for it. LOL :)
You’re lucky with a name like that!
[...] Potter (but with science and robots!) 29Mar07 (Okay, so I chose that title because the pi-effect has worn [...]
[...] facts about pi (see this post) [...]
hi
[...] all the chemists out there… 23Oct07 As Machiel pointed out, who should know as he is a chemist, it’s Mole Day from October 23 (10/23), from 6:02 AM to [...]
it is actually 3.14159265… I memorized it… check your spelling… tootlez!