Interesting Facts About The Number Pi (π)

1. Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be written as the ratio of two integers (fractions such as 22/7 are commonly used to approximate Pi; no common fraction (ratio of whole numbers) can be its exact value). Consequently its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. This means that any number you can think about is in Pi (it may not have been calculated yet). Go here to search for a number in Pi (http://www.angio.net/pi/)

2. Pi is an irrational number: its decimal value goes on for ever, never stopping or repeating.

3. The value of pi has now been calculated 12.1 trillion decimal places. (http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-12t/). This would take a person roughly 266 years to recite without stopping, going 3 digits per second

4. The world record for memorising the value of pi was set by Chao Lu of China in 2005. He correctly recited from memory its first 67,890 digits.

5. It took him 24 hours and four seconds at a rate of 47 digits a minute without food or toilet breaks.

6. He had planned to recite 93,000 digits but made a mistake at the 67,891st.

7. A bill before the State Legislature of Indiana in 1897 tried to set the value of pi at 3.2. It was narrowly defeated

8. If you write “3.14” on a piece of paper and hold it up to a mirror, it looks like the word “PIE”.

9. Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day: March 14, 1879.

10. The Greek letter pi was introduced for the ratio of a circle’s perimeter to its diameter by the Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706.

11. The way a river meanders is described by its sinuosity; the length of its winding path divided by the distance from the source to the ocean as measured in a straight line. Strange as it may be, the average river has a sinuosity of around 3.14.

12 Some scientists use the fractions 22/7, 355/113 and 104348/33215 to approximate Pi. These fractions have an error of only 0.04025%, 0.00000849% and 0.00000001056% respectively.

13. There are people who believe that Pi contains the answer to the universe, or that information is held in the digits. It has even been suggested it contains the VOICE OF GOD. In Carl Sagan's book 'Contact' the places of Pi are found to contain a message from the beings that built the universe.

14. On March 14, 2015, the date was the number 3.1415. That was the only day in world history, past and future, that the longest exact sequence of the first digits of Pi (5) will be written as a date

15. Computing pi is a stress test for a computer -- a kind of "digital cardiogram". (If your computer crash, no call my name)

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