Besides being Einstein's birthday, March 14 is the day we celebrate our favorite irrational number. Some mark the occasion at 1:59 AM (which is 3.14 159). Here's some Pi facts for you you to throw out at the many pi parties you will no doubt attend today.
First use of the Greek letter 'Piwas' is credited to mathematician Welshman William Jones in 1706. He used it as an abbreviation for the periphery of a circle with unit diameter.
Pi is the number of times a circle's diameter will fit around its circumference. It's incorrect to say that a circle has no corners, rather it has infinite corners.
In 1949 it took ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) 70 hours to calculate 2,037 decimal places of Pi.
Today Pi has been calculated to more than 6.4 billion known digits. It would take a person approximately 133 years to recite all of them without stopping.
At position 763 there are six nines in a row. This is known as the Feynman Point.
The current (?) Pi memory champion is Hiroyoki Gotu, who memorized an amazing 42,000 digits.
Write the letters of the English alphabet, in capitals, clockwise around a circle, and cross out the letters that have right-left symmetry, A, H, I, M, etc. The letters that remain group themselves in sets of 3, 1, 4, 1, 6.
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