Funny Facts for a Happy Pi Day
Here are some funny bits of trivia for a happy Pi Day. Let that math geek in you come out.
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Note: Most of my sources for these tidbits come from the wonderful book called The Joy of Pi by David Blatner (no relation to William Shatner).
Albert & Pi
- Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 – Pi Day!! Coincidence? I think NOT!
A Mathematician, a Physicist, and an Engineer walked into a Pi
Mathematician: Pi expresses the relationship of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Physicist: Pi = 3.1415927 =/- 0.000000005
Engineer: Pi is about 3.
Pi Jokes
- What do you call a snake that is 3.14 meters long exactly?
- A πthon
- Come to the math geek side: We have Pi.
- What do you get when you stand a bunch of sheep in a circle?
- Shepherd’s pi
- What do you get when you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?
- Pumpkin pi
- What was Newton’s favorite dessert?
- Apple pi
- Why do people get excited about Pi Day?
- I don’t know. It’s completely irrational.
- How much pizza do you get for a pizza with a radius z and a thickness a?
- (Pi*z*z*a)
- How do mathematicians scold their children?
- If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you pi times…
Best Pi Books
Check out my Pi Day list on Bookshop.org. I’m just starting with this bookstore and I love it! It supports local bookshops. Personally, I think you should check books out of the library, and then if you love them and want to add them to your home library, find a used copy locally.
Pi in the past
- About 2000 BC, Babylonians used π = 3 1/8. Egyptians used π = 256/81 = 3.1605.
- Archimedes used a spiral to square the circle sometime in the third century BC.
- Isaac Newton discovered calculus and calculated pi to 16 digits in 1666.
- In 1873, William Shanks published his calculation of pi to 707 digits. But in 1945 D.F. Ferguson found Shanks’ calculation wrong from the 527th place on. Then he took a year using a desktop calculator to calculate pi to 808 digits.
- In 1996, the Chudnovsky Brothers computed over 8 billion digits of π using a supercomputer they built in their apartment from off-the-shelf parts.
Trivial trivia
If a billion digits of pi were printed in normal-sized font, it would be over 1200 miles long.
MIT sports team chant
This is how I memorized 5 digits of pi:
E to the u du dx,
E to the x dx!
Cosine secant tangent sine,
3.14159,
Integral, radical, mu, dv!
Slipstick, slide rule, M-I-T!
Final thoughts
If Pi day were actually celebrated correctly, it would never end.
