Christine David Professional Learning Blog: Pi day at Tamaki College

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Pi day at Tamaki College

Pi day celebrations

Today is the International Pi day, we celebrated yesterday as today is the holiday.

Some interesting facts about Pi

Pi is the most recognized mathematical constant in the world. Scholars often consider Pi the most important and intriguing number in all of mathematics.
Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day (3/14/1879) in Ulm Wurttemberg, Germany.
William Jones (1675-1749) introduced the symbol “π” in 1706, and it was later popularized by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) in 1737.
Comedian John Evans once quipped: “What do you get if you divide the circumference of a jack-o’-lantern by its diameter? Pumpkin π.
The symbol for pi (π) has been used regularly in its mathematical sense only for the past 250 years.
In 2005, Lu Chao of China set a world record by memorizing the first 67,890 digits of pi.
A Givenchy men’s cologne named Pi is marketed as highlighting the sexual appeal of intelligent and visionary men.
We can never truly measure the circumference or the area of a circle because we can never truly know the value of pi. Pi is an irrational number, meaning its digits go on forever in a seemingly random sequence.
In the Greek alphabet, π (piwas) is the sixteenth letter. In the English alphabet, p is also the sixteenth letter.
The first 144 digits of pi add up to 666 (which many scholars say is “the mark of the Beast”). And 144 = (6+6) x (6+6).
In 2002, a Japanese scientist found 1.24 trillion digits of pi using a powerful computer called the Hitachi SR 8000, breaking all previous records.
Since there are 360 degrees in a circle and pi is intimately connected with the circle, some mathematicians were delighted to discover that the number 360 is at the 359th digit position of pi.