Ever year, Matt Parker calculates pi, and this year it was the largest manual effort to calculate pi in a very long time[1] . I took part this year, though I didn't end up in the video sadly. It was lots of fun though, and a nice trip to london
I put together an iPhone app that guides you through all the steps needed to compute Pi to 100 decimal places. Surprisingly enough, this doesn't require any complex math -- just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division. The hardest part is verifying your intermediate results, and the app will do that for you. In testing it, I've been able to compute about 40 digits by hand. The way I look at it, some people climb mountains, and others run marathons... I figured it'd be an interesting challenge to see if I could calculate Pi by hand.
Yes I feel so embarrassed if we're beeping out Pi and the message is received and decoded with the aliens thinking "They're still sending <what they call Tau> / 2". Imagine if we received a transmission of e/2. And what is our fascination with base-10 representation of Tau/2 digits anyway?
Halfway to the Tau Day (179th or 180th day of year) is March 29th or 30th depending on your definition of "halfway". Pi day is only 73rd or 74th day of year.
An apt comment on the horrid US-ian date format. Although the international notation, YYYY-03-14, which is de rigueur for political correctness, would side with the 14th of March.
I love the NYT Connections game, but some days it makes me feel like an absolute idiot because I can't get a single group correct and am puzzled when the solutions are revealed :D
Together with globle, travle, worldle, framed and gamedle these couple of games are what I play during my morning coffe break, and I'm glad that they exist.
If I feel like more I also try to solve boxofficegame and tradle, but I can't solve them often.
Thanks for the tip! Just played it and was absolutely destroyed by a random dad. I'm really not good at these word-based games, my strength is Globle and Travle. But Dadagrams is fun, added it to my bookmarks ;)
Watching a lot of American television, I'm normally OK, but what got me recently in connections is that apparently Jelly Beans are associated with Easter in the USA... that was a completely new revelation to me.
Plugging the Pi Day Challenge, an online puzzle math quest all about pi created by my high school math teacher, Mr. Plummer (aka Plum). He’s been updating it with new puzzles for the past 15 years with the only goal of getting students excited about math.
It requires a login to save your progress which I know a lot of people dislike here… but it’s worth checking out: https://www.pidaychallenge.com/
Perhaps we might proclaim all of March to be Biblical Pi Month in solemn remembrance of the declaration made in 1 Kings 7:23 and 2 Chronicles 4:2 that PI = 3.
Also consider a semicircle of diameter D. Here the outside of the semicircle S, is D * PI / 2, so PI = 2 * S / D.
Now instead of a single semicircle, consider two semicircles, each of diameter D/2, stacked on top of each other so their diameters line up to add to D. Each has a outside S/2, so once again PI = 2 * S / D.
Now do it for 4 semicircles each of diameter D/4. Again, PI = 2 * S / D.
Now continue to infinity. Eventually the outsides of the stacked semicircles will, at the limit merge to the diameter. Thus at the limit PI = 2 * S / D = 2 * D/D.
Thus PI = 2. Maybe Pi Month should be February? I will leave that to the religious and mathematically inclined to argue.
Would have been more entertaining if the "Oppenheimer" movie had been made about Frank Oppenheimer [1] -- a younger brother of J. Robert and the founder of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco [2], where Pi Day comes from [3]
a) 3/14 = 0.21428571428
b) If I take reasonable date formats, it's date 2024-03-14 = 2007 today
But kudos for only taking the first three digits, 3.14, as approximation for pi, which is in nearly all cases enough. Some friends in automotive engineering even tried using pi = 3 and 2*pi = 7 for a while, and the results were good enough.
[1] https://youtu.be/LIg-6glbLkU