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HAPPY PI DAY!!!

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Ok I have to get my geek on. Today is the official day for that pesky little number that we have to use to determine the diameter of a circle 3.14!! Here are a few little tidbits of history about PI

  • The ancient Babylonians generally calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius (pi=3), but one Old Babylonian tablet (from ca. 1900-1680 BCE) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi.
  • Ancient Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by the following formula (where d is the diameter of the circle): formula: [(8d)/9] squaredThis yields an approximate value of 3.1605 for pi.
  • The first theoretical calculation of a value of pi was that of Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BCE), one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes worked out that 223/71 < pi < 22/7. Archimedes’s results rested upon approximating the area of a circle based on the area of a regular polygon inscribed within the circle and the area of a regular polygon within which the circle was circumscribed.
  • A novel way to compute pi:  An eighteenth-century French mathematician named Georges Buffon devised a way to calculate pi based on probability. Buffon’s method begins with a uniform grid of parallel lines, a unit distance apart. If you drop a needle of length k < 1 on the grid, the probability that the needle falls across a line is 2k/pi. Various people have tried to calculate pi by throwing needles. Depending on when you stop the experiment, you can obtain a reasonably accurate estimate of pi.
  • The symbol for PI was introduced by the British mathematician William Jones in 1706, who wrote:

    3.14159 =pi

    This symbol was adopted by Euler in 1737 and became the standard symbol for pi.

source for info:  http://ualr.edu/lasmoller/pi.html

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Ok enough of the geekiness 🙂 ….lets go have some PIE!! Have a great PI DAY!!!

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