Pi Day 2009

Sets in between the Friday of March the 13th and the Ides of March, today is the Pi day of 2009. To honor this fascinating irrational number, allow me to post some tidbits which may or mat not be readily well-known to everyone, at least not to me :

• Pi as a number that starts with 3.14 will continue without an end, the highest number of digits that have carried out at the present seems to be 51 Billion by University of Tokyo according to this Pi-Search Page. Here's a table listing all the historical efforts on calculating Pi. (The table is not free from mistakes though. The first effort, done by hand, by William shank (1812-1882) was accomplished in 1873 -- not 1807 -- and only accurate to 527 places according to Wikipedia. )
• Archimedes is probably one of the earliest to study pi with this proposition in the book of "The works of Archimedes"
• William Shank used the formula developed by John Machin in 1706:
• A modern formula known as the BBP formula for Pi according to Bailey:

• How many digits of Pi a person can remember? Well, hundreds. In a 2008 discussion, a guy claimed that his niece memorized 2205. But the newspaper article he cited is no longer available. My question is really why?

Happy Pi Day 2008!


P.S.

I intended to post this blog on March 14th, at 1:59 pm EDT. I missed by a few minutes. Oh well, who's counting anyway!