Monday 11 March 2013

the life of pi

At some elusive yet definitive point on Thursday afternoon, for some blurred fraction of a second, just before school is dismissed, time will be aligned with ฮ , the fixed ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

Pi—pronounced pee and not pie by the Greeks, and corresponds to the 14th day of March and then the Pi moment comes (in military time) at some instant in the afternoon, an exact, though endless, star-date. Pi Day coincidentally also marks the birthday of Albert Einstein. In case you miss it—or don’t care for the switching between the month-day-hours conventions, there’s a second chance later in the summer, though not to be confused, known as Pi Approximation Day, 22nd July, in deference to the improper fraction sometimes used to represent the ratio. The seventh of October ought to be designated as World Ocean Day. It would be strange if we counted, based our number system, not just on the commutable properties of maths but also with landmarks of constants—one, natural logarithm, pi, etc. Could we have found the numbers of physics and nature without having first devised the means to number things for our own convenience?