Today is the day of Pi, noted ∏. His fans – there are many of them – celebrate him all over the world. This ha-∏ day is also a salute to Albert Einstein who would have celebrated his birthday today.
In memory of Jean-Luc Goudet, we are republishing this article today.
Today, Monday March 14, 2022, or 3/14/22 in English symbolism, mathematicians celebrate the number Pi, of which 3.1416 is rounded to four decimal places. In 2015, on the same day, fans of this irrational had already not missed the opportunity since 3.1415 is the exact beginning of this magic number. Some also take advantage of July 22 (also noted as 07/22), arguing that 22 divided by 7 gives a good approximation of Pi.
In short, Pi fans like to glorify this number useful to the wise. As would have said Archimedes if we are to believe the most famous mnemonic device for remembering the first decimal places (before the computers): “That I love to make known a number useful to the wise. Immortal Archimedes, engineer artist. Who of your judgment can value the value? For me, your problem had similar advantages. (the numbers of letters of each word give the successive digits 3.14159265…). To find more, with many other games of all kinds, nothing beats a stroll on the many websites of these happy mathematicians, such as ” Pi’s universe “. Serious but clear, a video by Mickaël Launay details some of the mysteries of ∏: Travel diaries of the number Pi.
Pi’s day is also Einstein’s day
Tonight, we will eat pies, as the site explains Pi Daybecause the pie is round (and good) and everything that is round is Pi. Also, in English, we say “magpie”. Today is also, and it is not nothing, the anniversary of the date of birth ofAlbert Einsteinwhich was born on March 14, 1879. It is also the day of Stephen Hawking’s death.
We can notice that, Pi being irrational, any sequence of numbers is somewhere among its decimals. Any day of the year can therefore be celebrated in a circle of Pi fans.
The history of the number Pi begins in Antiquity in the form of an enigma: construct a square with the same area as a given circle. Under the ancient condition of running this construction with ruler and compass, the exercise proves to be impossible but it will take two millennia and the intervention of algebraic methods to demonstrate it. © FuturaSciences/Hervé Lehning
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