As you may have heard, today is Pi Day. Since the digits of the irrational number pi are 3.14159…. And since today, on our calendar, can be represented as 3.14, this is a good day to salute Pi and all the other important mathematical constants.
I was in the 6th grade when my teacher or my parents told me there was a mathematical relation between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. I started measuring circles on classroom maps and such. They seemed to be right and I was impressed with the idea. At the time, I hadn't heard of irrational numbers and how they don't repeat digits in our number system. Rational numbers can be represented by a common fraction but irrational ones cannot be.
Just now, it is a little past 2 o'clock in our system of daylight savings time. A few moments ago, at 1:59, we could say it was the moment of Pi. I find it easy to remember 3.14159 and at that moment we experienced 3.14159. The title of this post shows the first fifty digits of pi, which I copied from a source on the internet.
I have read of people memorizing the first 200 digits but doing that seems somewhat pointless to me. The whole business of thinking about pi and its so-called connection to this day may seem that way to you.
