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Not About Humble Pie But the Enigmatic Pi

Today is International ‘Pi’ day. Here are some quirky facts about the number.

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“What do you get when you divide 22/7?”

Sounds like a class 4 math problem doesn’t it? But Pi (22/7 or 3.1415.... to infinity) has fascinated people for centuries. It is a part of popular culture, trivia and the stuff of nightmares for many a Humanities student.

Every year March 14, (or 3/14) is International Pi Day. This year though is extra special. At 3/14/15 at 9.26 and 53 seconds, we would have been able to celebrate the magical number’s first 10 digits.

No less interesting is how The Daily Telegraph chose to tell the story. Take a look.

3. The Greek mathematician Archimedes was obsessed with calculating pi. When the Romans invaded he was so engrossed in a mathematical drawing that he yelled at an enemy soldier: ‘Do not touch my circles!’ The soldier’s response? He cut Archimedes’s head off.

Today is International ‘Pi’ day. Here are some quirky facts about the number.
Image: iStock by Getty

. The Persian scholar Al-Khwarizmi (c.780-c.850) calculated pi to four places (3.1416). His term al-Jabr (adding the same number to both sides of an equation) gives us our word of ‘algebra’.

1. Dutchman Ludolph van Ceulen extended the run to 35 places. When he died in 1610, ‘3.14159265358979323846264338327950288’ was engraved on his tombstone.

Today is International ‘Pi’ day. Here are some quirky facts about the number.
Image: iStock by Getty

4. Supercomputers have now worked pi out to over 13 trillion places – and still there are no patterns or repetitions.

Today is International ‘Pi’ day. Here are some quirky facts about the number.
Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

1. In the Star Trek episode ‘Wolf in the Fold’, Spock defeats an evil computer by ordering it to ‘compute to the last digit the value of pi’.

Read the full story here.

(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)

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Topics:  Maths 

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