Happy π Day Everybody!!!

What? You forgot? Today is March 14th. 3.14! And in about ten minutes, it will be 1:59, or 3.14159. If you still don't know what I'm talking about, then let me explain. (This is where I push my glasses back up my nose and pull out the portable keyboard.)

π, or the mathematical oddity formerly known as pi, is the ratio between the diameter of a circle and it's circumference. You can multiply any circle's diameter by π and get it's circumference. No big deal right? Not really. That is until you learn that it is a never ending and never repeating number. What I mean is, computers have calculated it to over a trillion decimal places and have yet to find where it ends nor have they found any sort of pattern to the number. It's amazing actually. So amazing that I have actually heard the existence of pi used as a proof of God (since it is seemingly infinite and infinitely complex) and on the other hand, proof that God doesn't exist (since it is completely random, and the existence of God would mean order in all things).

But either way you look at it, I think we can all agree that today is a great day to remember our wonderful friend π. Maybe you can celebrate it with Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student who, over a 24 hour period, recited the first 67,890 decimal places of π in 2005. Or maybe you can write a "piem," a poem who's word lengths correspond to the digits of π (see http://users.aol.com/s6sj7gt/cadtext.htm for one that's 4000 words long by a man named Mike Keith). Or maybe you can just order up a nice piece of apple pie, pull out your graphing calculator (you know you still have it from high school), and see what all the fuss is really about.

Happy π Day to all!