Dr Michelle Dickinson: Celebrating Pi Day

Tomorrow is Pi Day, so I thought we would celebrate one of the most well-known numbers in math. March 14th, or 3/14 – in the American date form – is celebrated as Pi Day because 3.14 are the first digits of Pi. Nerds around the world – including me – love celebrating this infinitely long, never-ending number – usually by baking and eating an actual pie. Pi is the most studied number in mathematics and integral to our understanding of geometry. Historians aren’t sure when people first discovered the concept of Pi, but it’s been known in some form for almost 4,000 years. Ancient Greeks and Babylonians knew estimates of it and we think the Egyptians used Pi to build the pyramids. Today Pi is used in almost everything that involves circles. It helps engineers plot the orbits of satellites. Physicists use it to understand particle collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider as well as to describe other kinds of curves including light waves and sound waves. Architects use it for the construction of arches in bridges and buildings. Technically, Pi is a ratio that's equal to the circumference of a circle divided by that circle's diameter. More interestingly is that Pi is an irrational number. This means that it can’t be expressed as a fraction as doesn’t end with a repeating pattern and it doesn’t terminate after a certain number of decimal places so it just keeps going forever. To date, Pi has been calculated to over 62.8 trillion digits – which took computers over 100 days to calculate. So, on the official day of Pi tomorrow – which is coincidently Albert Einstein's birthday – let's celebrate this incredible mathematical ratio by eating our favourite pie.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.