Happy Pi Day!

Discussion in 'Celebrations!' started by matveimediaarts, Mar 14, 2015.

  1. matveimediaarts

    matveimediaarts Underappreciated genius

    Wishing y'all a very happy pi day! :D
    http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...igits_represented_on_march_14_at_9_26_53.html
    Happy birthday, Einstein! But this is also Pi Day, and a very special Pi Day at that.

    Why so special? The date is 3/14/15, the first five digits in the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
    150313_SCI_NationalPiDay-digits

    And—get ready for this—at 26 minutes and 53 seconds after 9 a.m., we will pass a date and time represented by the first 10 digits of π. Very exciting! If you miss it, there will be one more chance at 9 p.m. After that, you’ll have to wait another 100 years for that auspicious moment to happen again, assuming that we will still be writing our Julian calendar dates as we do in America. It ought to be a great moment for conspiracy theorists; they are missing a terrific opportunity to warn us about cables snapping on suspension bridges, oil rig draw-works no longer pumping in Texas, and countless highway accidents when the mechanisms of rack and pinion steering freeze.

    At that moment will π continue to be representable as an infinite sum, an infinite product, and an infinitely repeated fraction? Will it still be connected to the wave formulas for light and sound? Will it still tell us which colors should appear in a rainbow, and how middle C should sound on a piano? Will Albert Einstein’s energy-mass equation continue its connection to the curvature of space time? Will it still pop up in so many seemingly unrelated places?

    And most importantly, will we still be amusingly able to closely approximate it by tossing a gazillion nails on a wood planked floor? Will it be part of the normalizing constant in distribution tools of the Gallup polls soon to predict who might be our 45th president? And will it still be entrenched in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the equation that tells us just how precisely we can ever know the state of the universe?
    [cont'd at link]
     

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