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Tim Chartier, a math professor at Davidson College, found a way to express a principle of calculus using the best of all possible source materials: chocolate. He created a series of enlarging charts featuring a growing number of chocolate chips:
If you count carefully, we use 83 milk chocolate chips of the 121 total. This gives us an estimate of 2.7438 for ?, which correlates to an error of about 0.378. [...]
What do you notice is happening to the error as we reduce the size of the squares? Indeed, our estimates are converging to the exact area. Here lies a fundamental concept of Calculus. If we were able to construct such chocolate chip mosaics with grids of ever increasing size, then we would converge to the exact area. Said another way, as the area of the squares approaches zero, the limit of our estimates will converge to ?. Keep in mind, we would need an infinite number of chocolate chips to estimate ? exactly, which is a very irrational thing to do!
Link -via That’s Nerdalicious!
I was always bad at math in school, but there was always one thing even the worst math students could remember: pi equals about 3.14. Now the importance of pi in mathematics is being challenged. So take that seventh grade math teacher.
Last year, Palais’ followers gave the new constant, 2pi, a name: tau. Since then, the tau movement has steadily grown, with its members hoping to replace pi as it appears in textbooks and calculators with tau, the true idol of math. Yesterday — 6/28 — they even celebrated Tau Day in math events worldwide.
But is pi really “wrong”? And if it is, why is tau better?
The mathematicians aren’t saying that pi has been wrongly calculated. Its value is still approximately 3.14, as it always was. Rather they argue that 3.14 isn’t the value that matters most when it comes to circles. Palais originally argued that pi should be changed to equal (approximately) 6.28 while others prefer giving that number a new name altogether.
Did you hear the one about the state that tried to make pi equal to 3.2 -by law? It’s not a joke. It happened in Indiana in 1897.
The story of the “Indiana pi bill” starts with Edward J. Goodwin, a Solitude, Indiana, physician who spent his free time dabbling in mathematics. Goodwin’s pet obsession was an old problem known as squaring the circle. Since ancient times, mathematicians had theorized that there must be some way to calculate the area of circle using only a compass and a straightedge. Mathematicians thought that with the help of these tools, they could construct a square that had the exact same area as the circle. Then all one would need to do to find the area of the circle was calculate the area of the square, a simple task.
It can’t be done, but you don’t have to be a math whiz to be a state legislator. Besides, Goodwin had his reasons for pushing the bill to redefine pi. Read all about that strange episode at mental_floss. Link
The date today is 6/28, which is Tau Day. The number Tau is 2pi, or 6.28 (followed by many more decimals). Geek Are Sexy has an explanation of tau, which is kind of like pi, only more so. And since tau is 2pi, you should celebrate Tau Day by baking two pies. One for me, and one for you. And not to throw at each other! Link
See also: The Pi is a Lie
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I’ve watched a couple car odometers flip over to 100,000 miles, but redditor ImportedPotato had a nerdier number in mind. Now he just needs to keep driving until he can add an additional decimal place.
Pi Day, March 14, is long gone, but Serious Eats has only now released the winners of their Pie Day Contest. The one above won first place, but I love the Pi Within A Pie.
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Pi-Pie Jigsaw Puzzle – $6.95
Do you love Pi, Pie, and Puzzles? Behold the two-sided Pi-Pie Jigsaw Puzzle from the NeatoShop. Now you can devote your whole Pi Day to the things you love.
Happy Pi day!
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Toys & Games!
Comments Off Vi Hart, who knows more about math than I ever will, made a video and two pies especially for Pi Day, which she says we should call Half-Tau Day. She lost me when she said a pie is really 2pi, because I never took that class. I will take a slice of cherry, if you don’t mind. Link -via The Daily What
This, being the fourteenth day of the third month, is National Pi Day — a day to recognize the mathematical constant of pi. In this video, the daughter of YouTube user kurtgodden recited the first 500 digits of pi in 90 seconds. She’s memorized the first 2,300.
How will you celebrate pi day today?
via Nerdcore
Michael Blake assigned note values to numerals and played pi to the first 31 decimal places. He starts with a simply piano melody, but then he brings in an accordion, a xylophone, a ukulele, a banjo, and other instruments.
via Geekosystem | Previously: Pi on the Piano
Mmm ... Pi T-Shirt
- $14.95
Next week is Pi Day (3/14 here in the United States), so be sure to boost your geek street cred and get the proper Pi attire, the Mmm ... Pi T-Shirt by Nathan Mazur from the NeatoShop.
More: Pi Day Gifts | Science T-Shirts
By Laughing Easy
What time is it? It’s about Pi/2 past 2Pi/3. You don’t need to know the geometric definition of this mathematical constant to know what time it is since it’s not a digital display.
Link - Via John Gushue
This design by Etsy seller West Art and Glass is simple but elegant. It’s a glass bowl presenting pi to the first 1,498 decimal places in a spiral pattern. They’re made to order in any color.
Link via Geek Crafts
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ScienceBlogs, together with Serious Eats, held a Pi Day Bake-Off to celebrate Pi Day on March 14th. They received 35 pie entries, which have been narrowed down to ten finalists. Not only are these “pi pies” decorated in a mathematically clever way, they look scrumptious! Shown is Claudette’s amazing One-Hundred-Digit pie made with cherries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries. Sure it’s not round, but remember, pie are square! Link to photographs. Link to voting.
That’s 123 billion digits more than the previous number. Computer scientist Fabrice Bellard ran his calculations on a desktop computer, taking 131 days to run the program and then check the results:
Previous records were established using supercomputers, but Mr Bellard claims his method is 20 times more efficient.
The prior record of about 2.6 trillion digits, set in August 2009 by Daisuke Takahashi at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, took just 29 hours.
However, that work employed a supercomputer 2,000 times faster and thousands of times more expensive than the desktop Mr Bellard employed.
I blogged about that record at the time.
Link via Geekologie | Image: flickr user Paul Adam Smith, used under Creative Commons license
It all makes perfect sense now. I don’t know the original source for this image. If I find who did it, I’ll celebrate by calculating the area of a blackberry pie. -via Digg
This microwave safe and dishwasher safe stoneware pizza plate is divided into the first eighty-eight digits of the constant pi, should you ever desire to calculate its circumference.
Link via Nerd Approved
Researchers at the University of Tsukuba in Japan have broken the record for the number of calculated digits of the constant pi:
The T2K Tsukuba System is a 640-computer cluster with a processing speed of 95 trillion floating-point operations per second. The T2K calculated a total of 2,576,980,377,524 decimal places in 73 hours 36 minutes, which is a small fraction of the 600 hours taken by the previous record holders—Hitachi and the University of Tokyo—who calculated only 1.2 trillion places.
Happy Bloomsday, everyone! For those of us who aren’t hardcore James Joyce fans, today is the day that honors the Irish author (we’ll get to that in a second). It’s not an official holiday, but that doesn’t make it any less serious to those who celebrate it. Here are the details behind Bloomsday and seven other academic holidays you can celebrate.
Just about any kid who took chemistry in high school has participated in a Mole Day or two. To celebrate Avogadro’s constant, 6.02×10 to the 23rd power, chemistry teachers across the country make their students roll into school at 6:02 a.m. on October 23 for extra credit. At least, my chemistry teacher did. Avogadro’s constant, by the way, defines the number of particles in a mole, hence Mole Day. What you do to celebrate Mole Day really depends on the teacher – it can be anything from creating a poster for Mole Day to consuming a mole of water to creating cheesy mole jokes (Who was Avogadro’s favorite character on M*A*S*H*? Father Molecahy, of course).
Picture from MoleDay.org.
You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
Why May 25? It really has no significance to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The reason seems to be that fans wanted to honor Adams shortly after his death the 25th was chosen because it was exactly two weeks later. The date stuck, but TowelDay.org points out this lovely coincidence – “As the universe that Douglas Adams created was full of absurdity and randomness, it may be a fitting choice after all. And if you need an additional reason: if you add the hexadecimal numbers 25 and 5, and convert the result to decimal, you get 42!” Forty two being the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, of course.
Photo from Beny Shlevich.
Yeah, Tolkien’s so important he gets two days. March 25 is known as Tolkien Reading Day, but it’s also the day of the fall of Sauron. The Tolkien Society encourages fans to get together and read out loud while enjoying a hot toasted bun and a warm drink “in hobbitish comfort.”
Picture from TolkienSociety.org.
Although this is another mathematical day, it’s a bit more rare than the others: it only occurs when the month and day are the square roots of the last two digits of the year. We had one this year – 03/03/09 – but the next one won’t happen on the calendar until 04/04/16. In fact, there are only nine of them every century: 01/01/01, 02/02/04, 03/03/09, 04/04/16, 05/05/25, 06/06/36, 07/07/49, 08/08/64 and 09/09/81 (I know, you could have figured that out on your own. The first one was celebrated on September 9, 1981, created by a high school teacher named Ron Gordon. Nearly 28 years later, he still serves as the national publicist for Square Root Day and suggests that people commemorate the occasion by consuming radishes or other root vegetables cut into squares.
Monkey Day, December 14, was created just nine years ago by art students at Michigan State. It celebrates exactly what it sounds like it celebrates: namely, simians. What is there to celebrate about monkeys, you might ask? Lots, according to the Monkey Day website. There’s medical research, animal rights, and that whole evolution thing. But mostly, it’s a day to dress up like a monkey, talk like a monkey, and maybe donate some money to your favorite monkey-related charity. And drink, I imagine. Whatever the reason behind El Dia de Mono, it has some pretty powerful fans: Peter Jackson chose the day to release King Kong in 2005.
Picture from MonkeyDay.com.
Photo: andrew.le
Though I missed this one for Pi Day, I find Andrew Le‘s take on why Love is like Pi too cute (and true) not to post!
