Pi Day?
March 15th, 2007 by WaltI’ve seen multiple claims on the Internet that yesterday was Pi day. Was there a memo that I didn’t get? Who decided it was pi day?
I do remember quite clearly when I was in elementary school and the teacher announced that it was impossible to write pi as a fraction. I was shocked.
I was going to agitate for other deserving constants, such as Euler’s constant should get their own day, but honestly, I love every real number equally. They all deserve a day of their own.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
I vote for the 19th of November as Euler-Mascheroni constant day.
(That’s 11/19 the way the US expresses it. The approximation is good to 0.3%.)
March 15th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Who decided it was pi day?
Eve Anderson, I think.
March 16th, 2007 at 12:40 am
Hi,
Pi Day was invented by Larry Shaw at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The first Pi Day was March 14, 1988.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:26 am
It’s much better to write dates as DD.MM; there are no Pi days in this way.
On the other hand, not all real numbers are equally important. By cardinality, it is clear that there are real numbers no one will ever even think about, let alone give a name to them.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:42 am
I am extremely fond of all the real numbers that nobody will ever think about. They should totally get their own days.
Regarding date formats, I think MM-DD is superior since it’s descending order of “magnitude,” and is a smaller part of the larger ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD.
March 16th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
Well, you’ll see, there’s a little problem trying to give a day to each real number. Even if you use all the days in the next (supposedly) infinitely many years.
And for dates: standards are good for files, computer programs and things like that. When people talk in an informal way, they usually don’t use standards. In USA, people tend to talk about dates in MM-DD-YYYY format (when they mention years). I definitely prefer DD-MM-YYYY over this.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
Yes. Everyone knows about pi day. Last year I even got a pi tattoo! The temporary kind, not the permanent kind. It went well with my other pi-wear.
March 17th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
First it’s pi tattoos, then it’s pi gangs, and then you have rumbles in the alleyway behind the Physical Science building between rival partisans of famous mathematical constants.
March 20th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I thought it was meant to be July 22, ie 22/7 for those of us that like our dates that way?
March 23rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
“Well, you’ll see, there’s a little problem trying to give a day to each real number. Even if you use all the days in the next (supposedly) infinitely many years.”
Yes, it is a little known fact that Cantor stumbled upon his famous theorem during an unsuccesful attempt to give each number its own day.
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Walt, that is very, very funny!