I love π-day because it is a great day to share my inner (hahaha... ``inner'') geekiness with those whom I spend a lot of time with. It is one of the few geek-oriented festival days that can be easily understood and associated with (try explaining Star Wars Day without explaining the whole story of the Star Wars canon, or the even weirder Mario Day without explaining who Mario is) since most people will have some kind of passing familiarity with π through their interactions with any level of mathematics.
π is one of the first ``strange'' mathematical constants that many would know of when they were learning about circles and their associated areas and diameters. Some would happily remember it as 227 as the first approximation, before the non-repeating decimals of 3.14... are taught. Bigger nerds will remember the next best approximation as 355113, and then fall in the rabbit hole that is continued fractions.
Those who go further than primary school mathematics will learn of all the different fun of π. Firstly in the form of the change of ``natural'' angle units into radians, where a full revolution is 2π rad or just 2π (radians are so natural that they are technically a dimensionless quantity). Then π will start appearing as seemingly ``magical'' constants when various summations and integrals are taken into account, especially in the world of statistics (normal distribution, anyone?).
Those who aren't that mathematically inclined will remember some nerd whose claim to fame is the dubiously useful ability of reciting the digits of π to a thousand places or more, when about 15 decimal places of it is good enough for Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in their space applications, and also from the article, 40 decimal places of it are good enough to figure out the circumference of the visible universe with an absolute accuracy equal to the diameter of the hydrogen atom. Nowadays, we often hear of how fast a computer computes a certain [large] number of digits of π as a type of benchmark for the computer's computation speed, or as a way of stress-testing the machine.
There are those who pooh-pooh π-day, claiming that π is a usurper of the True Constant of the Circle that is τ (τ=2π), and that we should be celebrating τ-day (June 28) instead. Personally, I don't really care much about that particular line of thought---everyone has their choices of course. However, since τ-day was created almost in defiance to π-day's success, it has a strong Johnny-come-lately vibe to it that makes it just a tad more contemptible, though I would not stoop to making that an active sabotage.
Anyway, this year's π-day is a quiet one. It falls on a Sunday, and I am not working for anyone at the moment. So I will just enjoy this circle (2 pies, i.e. 2π, get it?) my own today.
Oh, this post is deliberately set to go out on March 14, 15:56hrs (SGT). This corresponds to the mixed base number of 3.141592-ish. The minutes is 56 because there isn't such a thing as 92.653589793 minutes, so I just used that to mimic the percentage of the hour.
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