LearnKey Blog

Happy Pi Day!

March 14 was chosen to represent Pi Day because it resembles 3.14, but the official celebration begins at 1:59 PM to make an appropriate 3.14159. Here are some fun facts about Pi and Pi Day. Here at LearnKey we are celebrating by eating some PIE and you should too! That was a mouthful of Pi for one paragraph.

  • Pi is the number of times a circle’s diameter will fit around its circumference.
  • Pi is an irrational number.
  • So far Pi has passed all randomness tests.
  • In August 2010 a supercomputer calculated the value of Pi to 5 trillion decimal places.
  • Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day in 1879.
  • The first million decimal places of Pi consist of 99,959 zeros, 99,758 1s, 100,026 2s, 100,229 3s, 100,230 4s, 100,359 5s, 99,548 6s, 99,800 7s, 99,985 8s, and 100,106 9s. Glad I wasn’t the one tapped to figure that out.
  • Chao Lu holds the Guiness World Record for memorizing Pi to 67,890 places.
  • Pi Day was started by Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1989.
  • In 2009 the U.S. House of Representatives recognized March 14, 2009 as National Pi Day.
  • Traditional Pi Day celebrations include walking in circles, eating pie, and reciting as many digits of Pi as possible.
  • In 2015 March 15 will reflect 5 digits of Pi. 3/14/15.
  • MIT sometimes mails application decision letters to prospective students to be delivered on Pi Day.