Did you know the roundest knight at King Arthur's Round Table was Sir Cumference? He got that way eating too much pi.
Or, did you know that today is Pi Day, the annual celebration of March 14, the day when math fans revel in the knowledge that 3.14 is the common, three-digit numerical estimation of pi, an infinite decimal representing the ratio of the circumference of a circle, no matter its size.
Pi in your eye
What do you get when you cut a jack o'lantern by its diameter?... Pumpkin Pi! What do you get when you take green cheese and divide its circumference by its diameter?... Moon Pi. What do you get when you take the sun and divide its circumference by its diameter?...Pi in the sky. Mathematician: "Pi r squared." Baker:" No! Pies are round, cakes are square! In Alaska, where it gets very cold, pi is only 3.00. As you know, everything shrinks in the cold. They call it Eskimo pi. What do you get if you divide the circumference of a bowl of ice cream by its diameter?... Pi a'la mode. 3.14 percent of sailors are PI rates!
Today is made more special, if you're the type who finds such things special, because this year math fans get to include the year and add two more digits. When expanded to five digits, pi is 3.1415, or today's date. Get it?
This is the first time in 100 years that Pi Day can be expanded by two digits to include the year, and to help celebrate, Blood Assurance is partnering with MoonPie to host a Pi Day blood drive. Blood donors today will be given a free MoonPie if they donate blood at one of the center's facilities.
"This is our first Pi Day promotion," said Charlie Callari, Blood Assurance vice president of marketing. "I saw on social media that Pi Day was coming and thought, we're probably not going to get this opportunity for another century, so I said, 'Let's do something fun.'"
The actual estimation of pi is infinite with no repeating patterns, so it is an irrational number.
"Star Trek" fans will remember the episode in which Mr. Spock managed to expel the entity Redjac, which had taken control of the ship's computer, by giving it a Class-A compulsory directive to compute pi to the last digit, which of course it could not do because, as Spock explained, "the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution."
A Chinese student holds the Guinness record for pi memorization by reciting 67,890 digits in 2005. It took him 24 hours to do so.
Computers keep topping each other, but the most recent record for digital digit recitation is at 15 trillion.
Pi is most commonly used to find the area of a circle, which is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or pi r squared, or A=pi*r^2.
According to mathforum.org, pi has been around for centuries in different cultures. Both the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew of the existence of the constant ratio pi, though they didn't have it estimated as accurately as we do today.
Contact staff writer Barry Courter at bcourter@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6354.