Today is Pi Day, the day we celebrate pi. Yes, it's March 14, or 3.14, the first three digits of pi.
If you really want to celebrate it at the moment, you should have blown a horn or rung a bell at 1:59:26 this morning. Too late!
When the news services say we're going to celebrate Pi Day, they out to put "celebrate" in quotes. I suppose it will be mentioned in schools, but "celebrate" seems a little... I mean, it's like throwing a party because water is wet. Except if all the water were anything but wet we would have a problem. If pi were a little different, would that change anything?
It is kind of interesting to wonder if pi could be anything other than what it is. Pi is an irrational number, a characteristic it shares with many people I know, and therefore even in different bases it will always be an infinite number -- unless it's in an irrational base, and even then it might be. But that's getting silly. Two irrationals don't make a right, though, although three left turns do.
Either way, pi is the number that we need to calculate the circumference of a circle, and to get anything other than that as pi we would need God to redefine the circle. A friend of mine who worked with little kids says that was the end of the line when kids would get on the "Why" train. ("Why is the sky blue?" "Because molecules of air split the light like a prism, and blue is the visible color." "But why blue and not red?" "Because of the wavelength of blue light." "But why does that make blue appear?" "Because blue is shorter and more scattered." "Why is blue shorter?" Repeat until you get to "Because God made it that way.") In other words, kids help illustrate that no matter how much you know, you eventually run into the end of your knowledge; and even if you knew everything, you'd wind up at the Unmoved Mover.
One more thought on this jolly holiday: I'd often heard the term "squaring the circle" to refer to that which cannot be done. Well, what does it mean to square the circle? And why not? I'm gonna do it!
Well, it turns out that squaring the circle means "constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge," according to Wikipedia, and "The transcendence of π implies the impossibility of exactly 'circling' the square, as well as of squaring the circle." So we either leave it there or we get back on the "Why" train.
Personally, I'm celebrating Pi Day by being glad I don't have to pass math tests anymore. Yay!
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