Today is 3.14, Pi Day. To celebrate, Science Blogs is having a Pi Day Bake-off together with Serious Eats. And Google has a special doodle logo…
New Scientist has five tasty facts about the famous ratio. From the third:
Pi is the only number to have inspired a literary genre
In his upcoming book Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, journalist Alex Bellos describes how pi has inspired a particularly tricky form of creative “constrained” writing called Pilish. These are poems – or “piems” – where the number of letters of successive words is determined by pi.
Wolfram Alpha points to a few websites featuring Pi Day poetry including the piaphrase: “Phrases or sentences in which the number of characters in each word follows the digits in the sequence of pi.” And the piaku: “Poetry in which the number of syllables in each sentence corresponds to the consecutive digits of pi.”
And today is as good a day as any to link to Radio Lab’s Numbers episode which includes a segment on innate numbers — “You and I might not even know what logarithmic counting is, but apparently we used it as babies.” From Benford to Erdös in which “a forensic accountant, describes how he uses Benford’s Law to bust crooks.” And Calculove, “a story about a friendship between Steve Strogatz and his high school math teacher.”
You don’t have to be a math nerd to enjoy it!
Later, removed Rocketboom’s Pi song embed. Replaced it with Have your Mind Read over Twitter for Pi Day…