Happy Pi Day, everyone! Today is March 14, or 3/14, which corresponds to the first three digits of the number pi: 3.14 (and here are the first million digits of pi, if you are curious). But anyway, this seems like a great opportunity to celebrate some of the little-known facts about this spectacular number!
1. Pi probably contains literally all of the information that has ever existed or will ever exist.
The digits of pi never repeat, and they never end as far as we can tell. In fact, pi has been calculated up to 12 trillion digits without a single instance of repetition or sign of ending. Because pi contains such a variety of information, if you used a code such as binary to translate the 10-digit number system into letters, you could probably find anything that has ever been written -- or ever will be written -- inside of pi.
The Library of Babel is a website that operates on that principle. It uses an organization system to categorize literally every combination of letters and numbers shorter than 3,200 characters; you can find any passage of that length or shorter that has ever been written within its massive archives.
2. Last year's Pi Day was the coolest Pi Day of the century.
Pi Day is considered awesome because it matches the first two digits of pi. So, mathematically speaking, 53 seconds into 9:26 a.m. or p.m. on last year's pi day was exponentially more awesome by a factor of seven!
OK, that math may not exactly add up to a literal exponential factor of seven, but I was really happy to have celebrated the once-in-a-lifetime event of the "Ultimate Pi Day" last year. I took a screenshot of my computer's clock and everything!
3. Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day.
Albert Einstein is widely known as the extremely intelligent man who revolutionized the field of physics. You also may know him as one of the most widely misquoted people in history -- because, if you want to sound smart, why not pretend that the archetypal genius agrees with you?
Regardless, he was born on March 14, 1879. Maybe that is why he grew up to become such a mathematical genius!
4. Pi could prove that we are not living in a computer simulation.
Some philosophers have proposed the idea that everything we experience is just a computer simulation. They argue that everything we see is just virtual reality and, because of that, we cannot even tell if the universe is truly real. However, some have proposed that the existence of irrational numbers such as pi disproves the simulation hypothesis. Basically, as far as we know, computers cannot store an infinite amount of information. And, again as far as we know, tell pi contains an infinite amount of information. Therefore, pi seems to imply that reality is physically real and not just a computer simulation. Hooray!
5. Some people want to replace pi with tau, but they are wrong.
There is a very passionate movement online to replace the beautiful and sacred number pi that we have all come to know and love with a new, strange number called tau. Put simply, τ= 2 π. The nefarious proponents of tau claim that using it instead of piwould simplify most mathematical formulas. They argue it would make math easier to learn. They lay out these arguments in their holy text, "The Tau Manifesto," claiming that "the combination
Not only is this heretical and gross, but it is also dead wrong. In a very detailed and in-depth analysis, Giorgia Fortuna at Wolfram found that only 18% of significant formulas involving π use 2π, which makes the Tau Manifesto's statement that the formulas they use as examples "are not cherry-picked" laughably wrong. If you want more details about why pi is superior to tau, I strongly encourage you to read that analysis as it goes into a lot of detail. Even if you don't read it, though, you can rest assured that pi is one of the coolest numbers out there!
For more information on the subject of, check out some of the following resources:
MSC, "The Pi Manifesto"
FreshTix, "5 Nerdtastic Ways To Celebrate Pi Day"
Wikipedia's articles about pi-related concepts
