What's Your Favorite Pi?

Pi Pie baked at Delft University of Technology
Public domain - Wikimedia Commons

Let's hear it for Pi, for today is March 14! 3/14, 3-14 or whatever format, it's still 3.14 day. Pi Day is celebrated everywhere in honor of this important mathematical constant. Even Congress has approved the designation of a day to recognize Pi. The website www.piday.org is replete with everything you'd like to know about Pi, including some very odd places that Pi can be seen. The Random Facts site has a list of 50 interesting facts about Pi, including this item, "In the Greek alphabet, π (piwas) is the sixteenth letter. In the English alphabet, p is also the sixteenth letter." Today is also, fittingly enough, Albert Einstein's birthday, though he didn't live to see Pi celebrated on its own day. He probably would have appreciated it better than most people.   And of course, the best way to celebrate this day is to... eat pie!

Happened Yesterday

Pi Unrolled by John Reid

From the US Census:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  TUESDAY, AUG. 14, 2012 - United States Population Reaches Milestone Shortly after 2:29 p.m. EDT today, the U.S. population clock will reach a milestone that is very meaningful to mathematical statisticians: it will show there are 314,159,265 residents, or pi (3.14159265) times 100 million. Pi is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. “This is a once in many generations event...so go out and celebrate this American pi,” said Census Bureau Chief Demographer Howard Hogan.

Happy Birthday to the 314,159,265th person born yesterday - may you always have pi!