Saturday, 14 March 2015

US Welsh Pi Day


In the USA they have their own way of doing things including the way they write the date. Whilst the technical world has adopted the format YYYY.MM.DD and the commercial world uses DD.MM.YY, (both of which have some logic to them) this little country across the pond and some of its friends contort the date to MM.DD.YY
pi islandSo today's date is represented thus:
ISO - 2015/03/14
UK -  14/03/15
US -  3/14/15
Using the contorted date form the USA has designated today as Pi Day. the day to celebrate the relationship between the diameter and circumference of the circle. This is because the first few digits of π   are....3.1415
Some even take this further to include the time......3.14.15:9:26:53
This all seems rather contrived to me. As it is impossible to represent π in decimal form completely I think the most perfect date to celebrate π must be July 22 - represented in the non-us contorted form - 22/7
Although this relationship has been known since the time of Archimedes the Greek letter π was first applied to this by a Welshman - Gareth Ffowc Roberts,  in the 18th century.

The first use of  π by Gareth Roberts




The sort of  π I'm interested in has a crust on the top

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments will be removed if considered inappropriate