Pi Day

What

Pi Day

When

3/14/2024

Well, happy Pi day STEM students of HSMSE!

I’m sure your math teachers today will touch on Pi day briefly, but we also wanted to share out some small fun facts about Pi day and Pi the number.

All of you likely know that Pi is a never ending and never repeating number, making it a famous Irrational number!! (No repeating and non-terminating)

Pi cannot be written as a fraction but Aryabhata discovered an approximation of pi, 62832/20000 = 3.1416.

An Indian mathematician discovered a formula to calculate pi quite precisely, without any formal math training and has been known to have been one of the world’s most intelligent geniuses, ever, his name was Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar. It is rumored to believe that a letter he wrote to a famous mathematician in England was first taken as insult as to ask ‘why are you sending me what I already know?’ Soon after however they learned this was the work of a math genius who created this and other math formulas from no formal math training and he was celebrated and his contributions to math formulas well received.

If you are really interested in cool math facts and how neuroscience and math may intersect you might be interested to read the book: Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Math (author Dehaene). I have found it to be an interesting read filled with some very cool and strange ponderings about the math we humans and even animals have had impact our evolution and substantiated findings with neuroscience research! Very cool read (although I’m a bit of a nerd and think Math is very cool! 😬).

Want to know more cool things about Pi? Google search Pi Day today and see what else is cool about Pi!