Celebrating Pi Day: Amazing Facts about Pi

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Firstly, we would like to greet you with a PIEM… 

Wait, it’s not a typo. You saw it right. It’s really a PIEM instead of a POEM. 

 

Wow (3), a (1) star (4) 

A (1) fiery (5) supernova (9) 

In (2) cosmic (6) burst (5) 

Wow! (3)

 

It would help you remember a few digits of π (3.141592653). Or you may even create your PIEMS if you are creative enough. 

 

π is the most studied endless number in mathematics and physics. It is integral to our understanding of geometry. Due to the digits after the decimal of π, March 14 is celebrated as the International π day. Well, here are some fantastic facts about π: 

 

  1. No π?: π was not always π. It has been in use for around 250 years when William Jones started using it for the term “the quantity which when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference.” 

  2. π Language: Just like the PIEM you read at the beginning, some people have even written a whole book containing around 10000 digits of π. This sort of writing has the name “Pilish.” You can find one named “Not a Wake.”

  3. 3.141592653: How many digits of π can you memorize? Ten? Fifty? Hundred? There is a guy Rajveer Meena at VIT University, Vellore, India, who has a record of remembering 70 thousand decimal places. It took him around 10 hours to recall all the digits!

  4. Never Ending: As π is an irrational number, we will never be able to find all the digits of π. Sir Issac Newton was able to calculate up to 16 decimal places. Later, Thomas Lagney figured up to 127 decimal places. During the 20th century, after one of the first computers was made, the digits of Pi increased from 2000 to 500,000.Later, this record was broken by a Swiss scientist by calculating up to 22 trillion digits of π.

  5. Most Digits: The current record for the most digits of Pi is 62.8 trillion digits, calculated by a Swiss supercomputer. Digits of π have always been a stress test for computers. It took around 108 days and 9 hours for the Swiss supercomputer to calculate 62.8 trillion digits of π. 

  6. Myth: π is also part of Egyptian mythology. People in Egypt believed that the great pyramids of Giza were built on the principles of π. The vertical height of the pyramids has the same relationship with the perimeter of their base as the relation between a circle’s radius and its circumference. 

  7. Life for π: The number π was so tempting, even in the 16th century, that Dutch-German mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen spent most of his life calculating the first 36 digits of π. It is said that the first 36 numbers were engraved on his tombstone. Although the digits of π are infinitely long, the sequence 123456 does not appear in the first 1 million digits of π, whereas 12345 occurs eight times within the 1 million digits. 

  8. Corners in Circle: Many mathematicians believe that it is more accurate to say that a circle has infinite corners than it is to say that it has none. It is only reasonable to assume that the infinite number of corners in a circle correlates to the infinite number of digits of π. 

  9. Enough decimal points of π: Mathematician James Grime of the YouTube channel Numberphile has determined that 39 digits of π—3.14159265358979323846264338327950288420—would suffice to calculate the circumference of the known universe to the width of a hydrogen atom. Some fractions used instead of π are 22/7 (0.04025% accurate), 355/113 (0.00000849% accurate), and 104348/33215 (0.00000001056% accurate).

  10. Sequence in digits: The first million decimal places of π consist of 99,959 zeros, 99,758 ones, 100,026 twos, 100,229 threes, 100,230 fours, 100,359 fives, 99,548 sixes, 99,800 sevens, 99,985 eights and 100,106 nines. At position 793, there are six 9s in a row, which is known as Feynman’s Point. The first six digits of π, 314159, appear in order at least six times within the first 10 million decimal places of π. The first 144 digits of π add up to 666 and 144 = (6+6) x (6+6). 

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