Sunday, July 22, 2012

All set for Pi Day?



My favorites are key lime and mincemeat. Okay it's really a play on:

Pi Day which is really about that mathematical thingy that everybody forgot right after high school geometry class. Anybody here (excluding maybe Stu Savory) ever have a need to use π in their day to day lives? Thought not. Only bits and pieces of algebra I've every used is to calculate driving times and distances with the formula RxT=D. Even having to build complex containment systems for work soon resulted in knowing calculations off the top of my head. Building dimensions tend to be fairly standard after all.

So why July 22 for Pi day when it should be March 14? Actually March 14 is the real pi day. (What an impostor?)
It's really Pi Approximate Day which is 22 divided by 7 in mathematical jargon. How that effects the price of tea in China is beyond me so I'll leave that to the brainiacs. As I've said math was never my forte.

So does this mean we must celebrate with mock apple pie?

6 comments:

Tom Harper said...

"...that mathematical thingy that everybody forgot right after high school geometry class."

You can't be serious. I'm constantly using pi, obtuse angles and the Pythagorean Theorem in my day to day encounters.

Demeur said...

Sure Tom sure.

BBC said...

I didn't know there was a Pi day, and like you have never used it, if I want to know how far a wheel will travel in one revolution I roll it one and measure the distance.

Hard to find good key lime pie, so many fakes.

Roger Owen Green said...

The argument for 22/7 is that in most parts of the world, the day comes before the month. In the US, which is, of course, the center of the universe, it's the other way, and 3.14 makes more sense.

Randal Graves said...

Mmmm....pi.

The Blog Fodder said...

Pie are not square, Pie are round. And yes, I use 3.14 many many times. Never used 22/7 as that level of accuracy was never my fine suit.