JACKSON, Wyo. — Check the date: 3/14. Look familiar?
It’s International Pi Day today, a mathematical phenomenon celebrated around the world.
The one thing we do know about the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is that we don’t know how it ends. Pi is an irrational and transcendental number. It continues infinitely without repetition or pattern, calculated to trillions of digits beyond its decimal point.
In 2017, Pi Day was celebrated with the largest number ever. Pi enthusiast Peter Trueb built a computer with 24 hard drives, each containing six terabytes of memory, in order to store the huge quantity of data produced in calculating pi.
In November 2017, after 105 days of round-the-clock computation, Trueb announced his computer had calculated 22,459,157,718,361 fully verified digits of pi, smashing the previous record set in 2010 by an extra 9 trillion digits.
And we haven’t found the end yet.
All this math should have you hungry by now. Every school kid has learned the secret to getting the most out of pi is done by adding pie.
What’s your favorite pie to celebrate the day with? Will you make your own, or dine out? Tell us about it!
