It’s 3/14, 1:59am, and you know what that means: Pi Day is officially in session.
Not that pi doesn’t get respect throughout the year — it’s certainly a higher-profile constant than Avogadro’s Number, the Boltzmann Constant, or even the Golden Ratio — but Pi Day is the one day of the year we set aside to celebrate everyone’s favorite ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter: (In Euclidean space, natch.)
Piday.org has some handy Pi Day-related resources, including e-cards and a “one million digits of pi” widget.
Standard Pi Day viewing: Darren Aronofsky‘s 1998 movie Pi, about a pi-haunted mathematician and the nefarious forces that encircle him. Off the beaten path, but worth reading: The New Yorker‘s 1992 profile of two brothers who build a supercomputer in their apartment to calculate as many digits of pi as they can, a profile which is less about state-of-the-art 1992 computing technology than it is about the obsession and creativity that the inscrutable sequence inspires.
Finally, this classic, obligatory Pi Day Dinosaur Comic, reminding you, as ever, that Euler’s Number Day (on February 71st) and Pi Approximation Day don’t get enough love:
(title image via Shanemhale. Dinosaur Comic with permission from the author.)
