Today is pi day-- a celebration for mathematics geeks. Remember--the value of pi is 3.14. It is used for instance in finding the area of a circle.
Back in the day in Mr. George's junior chemistry class like any good teacher he came up with a slogan to help drill formulas into numb skull heads.
To wit:
Pi r squared, cake are round.
Have a nice pi day.
Re: Pi day
Posted: Sat Mar 14, 2015 4:46 pm
by Tim Liston
So I'm one of those math geeks you refer to, or at least I was 40 years ago. Majored in math at Northwestern....
Pi is an irrational number. But interestingly, there is an arithmetic sequence that, when taken to infinity, converges to pi.
4 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 + 4/13 .... taken to infinity, equals pi. In my senior year there I learned and understood the proof. Of course I couldn't prove it any more (I don't even balance my checkbook) but I still find it fascinating that there is such a simple sequence that expresses the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. How could that be?
Happy pi day. Think an extra thought at 9:26:53 tonight, something profound, if you didn't this morning. Today is the only pi day in all of our lifetimes....
Re: Pi day
Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 6:36 am
by Gary Rice
There are numerous poems and writings celebrating the concept of pi.
One of the most fascinating, to me, would be the one published in the 1906 Literary Digest by A.C.Orr.
That poem uses the correct numbers (3.1415926535 etc...) to correspond with the number of letters for each word used in the poem.
Teacher that I am however, I will not reproduce that poem here, but in the classic tradition of teachers everywhere, I will ask, for your homework, that you look it up.
