5 Pi Day facts to satisfy your inner geek

Every year on March 14, geeks everywhere gather to celebrate Pi Day with all sorts of activities like eating pies with pi symbol decorations and walking in near-perfect circles. But what’s to celebrate? Find out a little more about the history of 3.14 after the jump.

1. What’s the history of pi day, how did it all begin?

In 1987 Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium started thinking about “rotation into another dimension”, which coincidentally is what pi describes: the relationship between two dimensions. Shaw and his colleagues built a pi shrine that displayed the first 100 digits of pi, walked in a circle around it and ate pie. Later, Shaw’s daughter discovered that 3/14 aligned with Einstein’s birthday and its popularity grew from there.

2. How many digits are in pi?

An infinity of digits. Pi is an irrational number, though so far the record calculated is 206,158,430,000 digits by a supercomputer in Tokyo. 3.14 is just the beginning.

If you’re interested in finding a sequence of numbers within pi, this Pi-Search site will help.

3. Where did the symbol come from?

In 1706, William Jones wrote:

There are various other ways of finding the Lengths or Areas of particular Curve Lines, or Planes, which may very much facilitate the Practice; as for instance, in the Circle, the Diameter is to the Circumference as 1 to (16/5 – 4/239) – 1/3(16/5^3 – 4/239^3) + … = 3.14159… =

is a Greek letter pronounced like the English letter “p”, and means perimeter.

4. How do people celebrate Pi Day?

Generally there’s a focus on eating pie and walking in circles. But, there are also pi poems and music and lots of people try to memorize as many of the digits as they can.

5. What are some fun pi web sites?

- The Pi Trivia Game, a quiz on the history of pi.

- Pi: the Game of Go, historic game where players place colored rocks on a board and try to control the most territory.

- Pi Trainer: type as many numbers of pi as you can remember and see how many you get correct!

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