Here are some fun facts you probably didn't know about Pi:
1. Isabel Hedges, Mimi's daughter, is a pi master. She knows more about
pi than I will ever know. And she can recite the first
something-like-35 digits of pi without even blinking. I've heard her do
it about twenty times, and every time is amazing. So yesterday, when I
found out (on Google) that it was Pi Day, I emailed Isabel to wish her
happy Pi Day.
Of course the Hedges were way ahead of me. Mimi
had already made Pi pie, as you can see in the photo above, and they
were settling down for an afternoon of mathematical magic: pastry, pi
and pizzazz.
Now that's what I call a couple of (pi-wonderful) Stephens women!
A few less-fascinating pi facts:
2. In the Star
Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold,” Spock
foils the evil computer by commanding it to “compute to last digit
the value of pi.
3. Comedian John Evans once quipped: “What do you get if you divide
the circumference of a jack-o'-lantern by its diameter? Pumpkin
π.”
4. Scientists in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact are able to
unravel
enough of pi to find hidden messages from the creators of the
human race,
allowing humans to access deeper levels of universal awareness.
5. The symbol for pi (π) has been used regularly in its mathematical
sense only for the past 250 years.
6. During the famed O.J. Simpson trial, there were arguments between
defense
attorney Robert Blasier and an FBI agent about the actual value of
pi,
seemingly to reveal flaws in the FBI agent’s intellectual acumen.
7. A Givenchy men’s cologne named Pi is marketed as highlighting the
sexual appeal of intelligent and visionary men.
8. We can never truly measure the circumference or the area of a circle
because we can never truly know the value of pi. Pi is an
irrational number,
meaning its digits go on forever in a seemingly random sequence.
9. Darren Aronofsky’s fascinating movie π (Pi:
Faith in Chaos) shows how the main character’s attempt to
find simple answers about pi (and, by extension, the universe)
drives
him mad. The film won the Directing Award at the 1988 Sundance
Film Festival.
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| Both π and the letter p are the
sixteenth letter in the Greek and English alphabets, respectively
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10. In the Greek alphabet, π (piwas) is the sixteenth letter.
In the English alphabet, p is also the sixteenth letter.
(info from http://facts.randomhistory.com/2009/07/03_pi.html)
11. See #1.
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