pi day

Pi day is today and believe it or not, it has been celebrated by many. Unlike previous years ago, when no one heard about Pi Day, this year many influenced people already heard about Pi day and they had decided to make special occasion to celebrate the pi day.

Read more after the break if you want to know more about pi day.

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Happy Pi Day! Here’s a refresher: Pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle. By the way, the world record for memorization stands at 67,890 digits, according to the Pi World Ranking List. For Sara Seager, professor of planetary science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pi day is part of everyday work in characterizing and searching for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

Here’s her basic formula: The volume of a planet is about 4/3 pi times the radius3.

pi day is also involved in calculations regarding an exoplanet’s atmosphere, since it can be described spherically, and spheres always involve pi.

“Coincidentally, pi is useful to estimate the number of seconds in a year (on Earth): There are approximately pi times 10 million seconds in a year,” Seager says.

On pi day, Pi helps describe the shape of the universe, says David Spergel, chairman of Princeton University’s astrophysical sciences department.

4pi is the ratio of the surface area of a sphere to the square of its radius, in geometrically flat space.

The Large Hadron Collider

Joe Incandela, spokesman for the collider’s Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, explains one way that pi shows up at the LHC:

In particle physics, if we can measure particle properties, like masses, very very precisely, we can sometimes find tell-tale evidence of undiscovered new particles. That’s because particles can transform themselves into other particles, and then come back together to make the original particle again. This is called a loop.

When you calculate the contribution of this process to the particle’s mass, a factor of something like 1/(16pi2) comes out, along with other factors that depend on the properties of the particles in the loops.

Scientists are hoping to see these kinds of particles directly which requires very high-energy particle accelerators like the LHC to make them. Gravity, energy and mass

On pi day, pi appears in Einstein’s equation for how energy and mass lead to the curvature of spacetime:

R_ij – (1/2)R g_ij = 8pi*G T_ij.

“Long story short: in Newton’s equation for gravity, the constant is just G; in Einstein’s equation, it’s 8pi*G,” he says.

Why? Voila – pi comes into the expression, because pi relates distances (straight lines) to spheres.

How DNA folds

Pi plays an important role in the way the genome is folded, says Leonid Mirny, associate professor at MIT.

The answer is about 1.5pi (or about 5) times!

Mathematics

More amazingly still, this value is 6/pi2!”

Studying crickets

Engineering

pi day is involved in calculating the surface area and volume of round three-dimensional objects. Drug design

The formulas for molecular surface area and volume involve pi day, and often appear in Bajaj’s calculations.
Source : http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/
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As unlikely as it may seem, the number pi, or 3.14159… The ancient Greeks were the first to study pi for its own mathematical sake.

Today, 4,000 years after people first discovered how useful pi could be, we are about to celebrate International Pi Day. (See picture of Larry Shaw, “Prince of Pi,” at right.)

Since then, this museum and many others, as well as universities, schools and individuals have celebrated Pi Day by performing pi-related activities; some serious and some less so, such as creating pi puns; baking, throwing and eating pies; and singing pi songs. What is Pi?

Without pi there is no theory of motion and no understanding of geometry. Pi occurs in important fields of applied mathematics such as Fourier analysis and image reconstruction. Pi goes global

Public interest in pi came to a head in 2009 when the U.S. House of Representatives formally declared March 14 National Pi Day, in House Resolution number 224. The growing interest in pi has seen it become firmly established in popular culture. pi day has been featured in such TV shows as The Simpsons and Star Trek, as the title of a Kate Bush song, in the movies The Matrix, and Pi; and in the 2001 novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel. If you’re better with numbers than words, some folks prefer to memorise pi for themselves. The current Guinness World Record for remembering pi is well in excess of 60,000 digits. What makes things really interesting is that pi day is an irrational number, so its digits never terminate or repeat. When we draw a picture, pi seems very random.
Source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
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It’s a holiday for math teachers: March 14 = 3.14 = Pi Day, named after the mathematical constant that is the ratio of a Euclidean circle’s circumference to its diameter. On Pi Day, we celebrate mathematics and things that are round — but instead of rounding up for pi, students relish every digit. Here’s how you can celebrate, even after you’ve graduated.

1. Memorizing as many digits of Pi as you can: Your Style blogger, who has not had to do any math more complex than calculating a tip at a restaurant since her freshman year of college, failed miserably at this task, remembering only up to 3.1415. Many math students will be competing against each other in classrooms across the country today to see who can recite the most digits correctly. But none of them will come close to the world record set by Chao Lu, who recited 67,890 digits of pi over 24 hours in 2005. Check out other pi record-holders at Pi World.

2. Rapping: There’s something about the wholesomeness of math class and pi that, when set to rap, creates the perfect ratio of nerdiness to cool.

3. Eating Pi(e): You do not need any excuses to eat pie, which is a dessert that surpasses its more popular relative, the cupcake, in so many ways. Our food section has dozens of recipes for you. Try the upside-down three-chocolate brownie pie, the pecan pie, the cappuccino cream pie, the banana peanut butter s’mores icebox pie, the buttermilk pie with rhubarb compote, the stroganoff muffin pie (for something savory), the simple-but-comforting apple pie, and my favorite, the petite hand pie.

0.14 Perfecting your pie crust: Adding on to that last suggestion with a little sliver of a tip: Today’s a good day to learn how to make a proper pie crust, something that can elude home cooks

Source : http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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If you still want to know more about pi day, you can watch the following video :