#PiDay + 1

I guess that it only makes sense with everything else that has gone wrong, having PiDay on a weekend doesn’t come as a surprise. For the uninitiated, PiDay = 3.14 or March 14. PiDay should be celebrated – well in schools if nowhere else.

It’s something that the mathematics geek in me enjoys every year. I’ll poke around with my Pi Stuff Collection and some of the the resources that I’ve tucked in there. To be honest, it was something I got excited about when in school and university as well as teaching. But, quite frankly, it’s something I’ve never actually used in real life.

Walking about, I see it everywhere but I’ve never had the urge to whip out my calculator to check the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. We all have done many mathematical questions in class that required the use of π but probably never really appreciated what a special number it actually is. I can recall it as being approximately 22/7 and then later 3.14 when we learned how to use calculators and multiply with numbers with decimal places. I even committed more digits to memory for some reason – 3.1415926535 and then it continues. If you need to know 100,000 digits, check this out. 100,000 Digits of Pi.

It brings to mine a mathematics class in high school where the teacher had written out the digits on a continuous roll of paper that went right around the classroom

But the skeptic in us knows

That will alienate any friends in the industry I might have!

It’s funny how mathematics which is a discipline area with so much accuracy required would allow 22/7. To see how far off it was, I whipped this up.

The purpose was to compare just what 22 / 7 looks like when compared to the constant included in SmallBasic.

Not terribly close if you’re looking for precision but if you can live with two decimal places, you’re good to go, I guess.

But, π does have a day of its own so enjoy it if you will.

You can see the collection of “Pi Stuff” that I’ve curated in this Flipboard document.