Happy Pi Day! Celebrate the infinite on 3/14!

Today, March the 14th (3.14), is Pi Day, the day we celebrate the mathematical wonder of the universe that is π!

Even today, over 4,500 years after the first attempts to figure it out, scholars, scientists and mathematicians still have not computed its exact value!

π is a mathematical constant, representing the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (C = π × d, thus π = C ÷ d). If you had a circle that was 1 metre wide, marked it at starting point and then rolled it along the ground, that starting point would touch the ground again at 3.1415926... metres. Apparently, no matter how accurate your metre-stick is for measuring the diameter, it won't be accurate enough to tell the exact distance between the start of your roll and the end!

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The reason why the exact value of π hasn't been found is that it's an 'irrational number'. As far as we know, it will go on for infinity, and that is one of the weirdest things about our universe. No matter how advanced we get, it seems that we can have a very good approximation, but we will never know the exact value of anything we calculate using π.

Fortunately, the universe is rather forgiving about the situation, and we only need to know π to about eight or 10 digits to get useful results. However, it's still an interesting exercise to see how many decimal places we can compute it to, and this page lists the value to 1 million decimal places!

Who knows, maybe once we have a better handle on the multiverse and how all the different dimensions influence the four dimensions of spacetime, the value for π will resolve down to an extremely simple number. For now though, just take some time today to eat a slice of your favourite kind of pie, in celebration of this wonder of the universe, and don't forget to wish Albert Einstein a Happy 134th Birthday while you're at it!

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