Maybe throw some pineapple in there? Go crazy. Those of you who watched Star Trek may remember Spock defeating an evil supercomputer by commanding it to calculate the last digit of pi.ģ – If you’re celebrating Pi Day today, you might do it by baking a pie. In fact, computing pi is so difficult that it’s used as a stress test for modern computers. He had planned to make it to 93,000 but went wrong on the 67,891 st… ouch! He did do quite a lot better than Ludolph Van Ceulen though, who spent most of his life calculating pi to 35 digits (although we suppose he was probably at a disadvantage for having lived in the 16 th Century). (This, by the way, is not an excuse to skip any pi related questions in upcoming exams).Ģ – Pi has been calculated by computer up to 13 trillion decimal places, although the human record for reciting it correctly is held by Chao Lu, who remains undefeated since 2005 as reciting 67,890 digits. Although you’ve been taught that the circumference of a circle is pi*diameter, and that the area of a circle is pi*r 2, the irritating truth is that because we can never know all of the digits of pi, we can never truly know the circumference or the area of a circle. Pi is also an infinite decimal meaning that those significant figures just keep on coming. We don’t mean that it’s behaving inexplicably – it’s an irrational number, meaning that no fraction accurately describes pi (except perhaps pi/1, but that’s probably cheating). (Title Photo Credit: Wikipedia)ġ – Pi is irrational. Take a look at the first few digits of pi (3.1415), turn them into a date and you’ve got 3/14/15! Even better, you don’t have to worry if you’re a little too busy to celebrate Pi Day this year, as the digit following 5 is 9, so if we want to be accurate we can round up to make next year’s 3/14/16 an extra special Pi Day too! In celebration of this occasion, we’re bringing you the top 5 facts about pi to brighten up your revision and make Pi Day 2015 that little bit more special. And this year, Pi Day will be extra special.

Pi Day is on its way – the one time a year where 14-year-olds will see it as socially acceptable to pretend they like maths, and tasty deserts decorated with numbers and Greek symbols grace classrooms worldwide.

Mystery pi taringa