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Celebrate Pi and Einstein today

Posted by Richard on March 14, 2017

Today, March 14, is Albert Einstein’s birthday. It’s also Pi Day (3/14) for those who use the month/day/year date format. If you’re into greater precision, celebrate Pi Minute (3/14, 1:59) or even Pi Second (3/14, 1:59:26).

Europeans and others who use the more logical day/month/year date format prefer to celebrate Pi Approximation Day on July 22 (22/7).

Technically, of course, all of these, including Pi Second, are Pi Approximations.

In any case, enjoy some pi(e) today! Or convert some matter into energy!

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One Response to “Celebrate Pi and Einstein today”

  1. Rick Shultz said

    You know what always made me lmao about this is the various contests to calculate Pi out to the largest number of decimals. You would think by now they would have given up since its an infinite decimal and has so far been carried to more than 2 TRILLION places. Not even NASA uses more than 15 decimal places to calculate the orbits for their space craft, and the reasons are dog brain simple. 1.The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let’s say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal,that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles. We don’t need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger.
    SMDH

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