Happy Pi Day!

My daughter turns 23 today. She was born on a Saturday like today, thereby threading the needle between a Friday the 13th and the Ides of March. Einstein was also born on 3/14.

However, it is also Pi Day (based on the mathematical constant 3.14) and today, in particular, is a once in 100 years Pi Day because, as written in the Boston Globe:

"For the first time in 100 years, Pi Day will fall on 3/14/15, matching up with the first five numbers that represent the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, 3.1415.

Going deeper, at 9:26:53 a.m. — and again at night — the day will represent the first 10 digits of the mathematical constant (3.141592653), bringing much merriment to members of the math community."

So best wishes to those DPer's who are celebrating their birthday today!

 

I hear it's infinite and unrepeating. I wonder who came up with this notion. Everything has its end.

 

My understanding is that mathematicians have put supercomputers on this issue and they have taken the calculation pretty far with no end result. Not sure how infinity can be tested, though.

 

Happy Pi day. I have enjoyed this day with my mathematician friends.

 

Thanks @xendurinan. Perhaps you or your mathematician friends can enlighten me and @qwikad.com as to the infinity claim? Is there a basis or proof of this, somehow? I am sure that this was covered in school, but that was a loooooong time ago for me.

 

I'm no mathematician, but my understanding is that π is (1) irrational, meaning that it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers (whole numbers), and (2) transcendental, meaning that it cannot be defined by a simple algebraic equation. The infinity question is quite straightforward: even a simple fraction such as 1/7 converts to a decimal expression that repeats to infinity (0.142857142857142857...). In the case of π, however far you expand the decimal, it will never, unlike the expansion of 1/7, repeat itself.

 

You sure sound like a mathematician! At least to this political science major, you do...

 

I guess that's because politics sometimes can be a numbers game.