West Palm Beach, Florida – Mathematics enthusiasts worldwide, from university students to rocket scientists, celebrate the day PI, which is March 14 or 3/14, the first three digits of an infinite number with many practical uses.
Many people will mark the day with a slice of cake: sweet, salty or even pizza.
In a nutshell, PI is a constant mathematics that expresses the relationship of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It appears in numerous formulas used in physics, astronomy, engineering and other fields, which date back thousands of years to Ancient Egypt, Babylon and China.
Pi Day dates from 1988, when physicist Larry Shaw began celebrations at the Explocoratorium Science Museum in San Francisco. The party really did not gain national recognition until two decades later. In 2009, Congress designated every March 14 to be the big day, hoping to stimulate more interest in mathematics and science. Appropriate enough, the day is also Albert Einstein’s birthday.
Here are a little more about the origin of the holidays and how it is celebrated today.
Pi can calculate the circle of a circle by measuring the diameter, the straight distance through the circle medium, and multiplying that by the number of 3.14 more.
It is considered a constant number and is also infinite, which means that it is mathematically irrational. Long before computers, historical scientists like Isaac Newton spent many hours calculating the decimal places by hand. Today, using sophisticated computers, researchers have presented billions of digits for Pi, but there is no end.
He was not given his name until 1706, when the Welsh mathematician William Jones began using the Greek symbol for the number.
Why that letter? It is the first Greek letter in the words “periphery” and “perimeter”, and pi is the relationship of the periphery of a circle, or circumference, to its diameter.
The number is key to precisely indicating an antenna towards a satellite. It helps discover everything, from the size of a necessary mass cylinder in the refinery equipment to the size of the paper rolls used in printers.
PI is also useful to determine the necessary scale of a tank that serves heating and air conditioning systems in buildings of various sizes.
NASA uses Pi on a daily basis. It is key to calculating the orbits, the positions of the planets and other celestial bodies, rocket propulsion elements, communication of spacecraft and even the correct deployment of parachute when a splashes vehicle on Earth or lands on Mars.
Using only nine pi digits, scientists can calculate the circumference of the Earth, so precision that it is wrong in just a quarter of an inch (0.6 centimeters) for every 25,000 miles (approximately 40,000 kilometers).
Every year, the San Francisco Museum that coined vacations organizes events, including a parade around a circular plate, called Pi Shrine, 3.14 times, and then, of course, festivities with many cakes.
Throughout the country, many events are now held at the University Campus. In Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter, Florida, the students of the Jupiter Mathematics Club are organizing an extravagance of Pi Day with a raffle to hit the math teachers with a cake, along with a contest for whom you can memorize most of the PI digits.
Restaurants from all over the country, including some pizza chains, also offer special $ 3.14 on Pi Day.
NASA has its Annual Pi Day challenge online, offering many games and puzzles, some directly from the space agency’s own play book, such as calculating the orbit of an asteroid or the distance that a lunar rover would need to travel every day to survey a certain lunar area.
Possibly the best known scientist in the world, Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Germany. The infinite number of Pi was used in many of its innovative theories and now Pi Day gives the world another reason to celebrate its achievements.
In a little mathematical symmetry, the famous physicist Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018 at age 76. Even so, Pi is not a perfect number. Once he had this to say:
“One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply does not exist. Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist. “
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Associated Press’s reporter Stephany Matat contributed to this West Palm Beach report, Florida.
