3.141592653 (UPDATED x 2)

There. 9:26 a.m. on March 14, 2015 has come and gone (at least in my time zone—sorry, Hawaii), and we never have to see this stupid meme again in our lifetimes:

March 14, 2115 will probably be even more insipid, I fear.

UPDATE (03/14/2015): Okay, this SMBC comic is a worthy Pi Day tribute.

UPDATE 2 (03/14/2015): This article by Ana Swanson at the Washington Post managed to overcome my snark about pi:

Why is pi so interesting? For one thing, pi describes a perfect circle, and thus is included in any formula that describes a circle or some kind of repetition, from a heart beat to the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

For another, pi has the appearance of being random (or, more accurately, “uniformly distributed”) — meaning that, as its digits continue, there is an equal chance of any digit between 0 and 9 appearing. In the first six billion digits of pi, each of the digits 0 through 9 shows up about six hundred million times.

If pi were truly random, that would mean that the number sequence in pi would never repeat itself, and — because pi is infinite — it would contain all patterns in existence. Any word that you can think of, when encoded in numbers, would show up in pi, says Kryzwinski. So would the entire works of Shakespeare, all possible misprints and permutations of Shakespeare, and even, if you were patient enough, pi itself. As Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz writes for The New Yorker, pi is so special in part because it “puts infinity within reach.”

Pi looks random: Mathematicians have computed pi out to 10 trillion digits and seen no evident pattern. But what really vexes mathematicians is that no one can definitely say that pi is random — no one has figured out the mathematical proof. And in another sense, pi is anything but random: After all, the number embodies the order of a perfect circle. “The tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi,” writes Strogatz.

Share

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *