back to article Pi(e) Day of the Century is upon us! Time to celebrate 3/14/15 in style, surely?

It's the 14th of March, which means only one thing to maths nerds in the good ol' US of A: Pi Day. Americans, who insist on putting the month before the day (crazy, right?) when it comes to date arrangement, celebrate the mathematical constant that frames our science and maths – 3/14. It also happens to be Albert Einstein's …

  1. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Load of bollocks

    Date/time format is a human convention - so it doesn't mean a thing.

    1. mafoo
      Coat

      Re: Load of bollocks

      Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

    2. AceRimmer

      Re: Load of bollocks

      And even then MMDDYY is the format of idiots

      1. billse10

        Re: Load of bollocks

        not to mention the dozens of strange people who were hours late yesterday anyway ......

        Hello from Greenwich :-)

    3. Lusty

      Re: Load of bollocks

      How I wish I could calculate Pi...

      1. phil dude
        Coat

        Re: Load of bollocks

        4*atan(1).....

        Yes, I'll get my coat...

        P.

    4. the spectacularly refined chap

      Re: Load of bollocks

      Date/time format is a human convention - so it doesn't mean a thing.

      But so is the decimal number system.

    5. Tony Green

      Re: Load of bollocks

      And that date/time format being the yank one, doubly bollocks.

  3. Zog_but_not_the_first
    Pint

    Obligatory Simpson's retrospective

    Hmmmmm, Pi...... {drool}

    Always best with one of these >>>>>>>>>>>

  4. Brent Longborough
    Trollface

    Every year, the same B*ll*x

    Thank you so much for irritating me this Saturday.

    Everyone with an IQ over 75 already knows this is the stupidest meme-that-doesn't-work ever invented; as to the remainder, can we try to convince our North American colleagues that 31st April would be a better date for this nonsense?

    1. ashdav
      Thumb Up

      Re: Every year, the same B*ll*x

      Ha Ha. 31st April. Good one.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: Every year, the same B*ll*x

      You miss the point... it's an excuse to drink to excess. Much like St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo. So instead of pretending to be Irish or Spanish, the natives can pretend to be geeks and nerds while hoisting their beer.

    3. spam 1

      Re: Every year, the same B*ll*x

      you'd have to convince everyone about April 31st since there aren't 31 days in April; there are 31 days in May however which would make more sense

  5. Matthew Smith

    Pi day is 22/7 in Britain

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Almost.

      bc 1.06.95

      Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

      This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

      For details type `warranty'.

      22/7

      3.14285714285714285714

      1. phil dude
        Boffin

        fixed that for you....

        bc -l

        bc 1.06.95

        Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

        This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.

        For details type `warranty'.

        scale=100

        4*a(1)

        3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\

        8164062862089986280348253421170676

        P.

      2. Red Bren
        Unhappy

        I must be using biblical linux

        bc gave

        22/7 = 3

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I must be using biblical linux

          Define the mathlib with '-l' (man bc).

          1. the spectacularly refined chap

            Re: I must be using biblical linux

            Define the mathlib with '-l' (man bc).

            No, the problem there isn't that the maths library isn't loaded but the scale factor is left at default (i.e. integer). You need to set the scale register to some positive value to get that many decimal places. This is a backstop against recurring decimals and irrational numbers - since it is arbitrary precison even something as simple as 1/3 would carry on forever as it tries to calculate an exact decimal value (0.333333...) unless some limit was in place. See the very man page you reference.

            1. Vladimir Plouzhnikov

              22nd of July

              But... it doesn't work for DD-MM-YY :-(

              All I get is 0...

              OMG! The world is gonna end!!!

    2. Bleu

      The twenty second of July

      really seems to be a much better idea.

      Much too hot here, though, dog days or very close to them.

      A halfway decent pie is nowhere to be found here, at any time.

      Why is the 15 part supposed to be important?

  6. VinceH

    "Americans, who insist on putting the month before the day (crazy, right?) when it comes to date arrangement, celebrate the mathematical constant that frames our science and maths – 3/14."

    As I tweeted this morning:

    Today is Pi Day. The date corresponds with Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter* - which is now 14.315 due to inflation.

    * Actually, I didn't spot until much later that I actually said "the ratio of a circle's circumference to its ratio" - D'oh!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    I was thinking of saying "Stupid Yanks"

    But everybody already knows that.

    1. mafoo

      Re: I was thinking of saying "Stupid Yanks"

      I was going to, but then I thought i better read the comments first to see how many people beat me to it. ;)

  8. Peter Johnston 1

    Not only is the month in the wrong place, but the year celebrates an event which didn't happen in the chosen year. Perhaps it's time for a new digital calendar.

  9. John Robson Silver badge

    Dates?

    Why does it strip leading zeros and the century indicator.

    That's no good. Besides Tau day is where it is at - the USians still celebrate on the wrong day of course...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Dates?

      Yes I was looking for 4th September 1966 and mypiday.com found 4966 I was expecting 04091966.

      It will be in there somewhere and repeated an infinite number of times...

    2. wdmot

      Re: Dates?

      So when ought one celebrate Tau day? 6th day of the 28th month? 62nd day of the 8th month?

      Besides, Brits and Yanks both have the date format wrong -- it should start with the (full) year to make sorting by date easier...

      1. ravenviz Silver badge
        Angel

        Re: Dates?

        God uses hidden lists.

        /SharePoint

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Americans and PI

    Although there is an urban myth dating from 1998 that Alabama legislated Pi to be 3 which was based on an April fool which went viral

    see http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/pi.asp

    The amazing thing is that something similar did in fact happen a century earlier in Indiana where House Bill 246 was passed which define PI as 3.2

    see

    https://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/localgov/Second%20Level%20pages/indiana_pi_bill.htm

    Fortunately the bill died in the senate after the vote was indefinitely postponed

    http://mentalfloss.com/article/30214/new-math-time-indiana-tried-change-pi-32

    http://io9.com/5880792/the-eccentric-crank-who-tried-to-legislate-the-value-of-pi

    1. arctic_haze

      Re: Americans and PI

      It would be even more fun if they voted the ratio of gravitational mass to inertia mass as 1.2.

    2. Bleu

      Re: Americans and PI

      Read about that in a reliable source in print. Made me laugh aloud.

    3. Adrian Harvey
      Headmaster

      Re: Americans and PI

      I took an engineering course where we used 3 as the value for pi.

      Admittedly this was because the gearboxes on the lathes only had a limited set of speeds on offer, so there was no point at all in using more than 1 significant figure. Still 3 is not wrong for pi so long as you only want results with limited precision!

  11. Graham Cunningham

    Shouldn't this day be in 2016 for those who can round?

  12. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

    9:26?

    3.14152126? Or do mathematicians still use a 12 hour clock? Time and date calculations are fraught with enough complications with doing that.

    Surely if we are going to be dropping centuries, removing leading zeros and swapping the locations of mm and dd then it ought be at 9:26AM

    Maybe it should be 31/4/15 9:26 , ie 2031, April 15th.

    1. Mark Allen

      Re: 9:26?

      You beat me to it. I was about to point out the same thing.

      Trouble is, 9:26 doesn't work either due to the zero. 14/03/2015/09:26

      And who puts the time after the date? This is pushing vague numeric associations to an extreme.

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

        Re: 9:26?

        And who puts the time after the date?

        You mean that we should really be waiting until the early hours of September 15th, 2026?

  13. Carl W
    Trollface

    Surely any date/time format other than YYMMDD HH:MM:SS is illogical?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "[...] format other than YYMMDD HH:MM:SS is illogical?"

      The generic expression is usually? written as YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS

      Unless you are using filenames that take a slash and : as delimiters in which case YYYYMMDD HHMMSS is the best form for any sorted activity.

      An abbreviated YY year has led to all sorts of complications - like old people being sent their school joining instructions because they have reached 105. Since the millennium it has also been a source of confusion as to which end is the year field.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Or if we want to be standards compliant (ISO 8601): YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ for UTC at least.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        > An abbreviated YY year has led to all sorts of complications

        This is a pet peeve of mine.

        Database programmers (and UI designers) are forever being caught out with ambiguous date formats.

        What I can't fathom is why we still insist on stupid date formats on web pages and on forms like 01/02/03 when an unambiguous form is just as straighforward and less likely to lead to mistakes, especially after the Y2K fiasco.

    2. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Surely any date/time format other than YYMMDD HH:MM:SS is illogical?

      Only in a universe where the earth is at its centre.

      I presumed that this was a tongue-in-cheek comment, but with 4 upvotes I think this kind of thing needs to be seriously debunked.

      YYMMDD HH:MM:SS does not reference a unique point in time. Not unless you state a timezone and also the underlying calendar. Don't forget that with western cultures there have been calendars other than the current one. Even then, unless you are very careful, some times are not unique. For example, in areas with Daylight Saving Time, when the clocks go back, the same time can exist twice. (And that is all without bringing non-western calendars into consideration).

      Pi, on the other hand, is a constant. It is constant whatever your units of measure. Ok, ok, to be as pedantic as I have been the number base (10) needs to be mentioned.

  14. AndrueC Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    I once memorised PI to 150 decimal places. It was written on page 57 of SMP book G I think. That was 30 years ago though so not sure how much I still know.

    Hmmm.

    3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971699397510..bah. Getting old I reckon :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Daniel Tammet holds the record for memorising π to 22,514 digits.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yawn..

    Sorry, pi is an OK number, but I'm afraid I'm not that deep into math that I'd celebrate it.

    It's nonsense, leaving me pi-ning for the fjords.

    Yes, yes, I'm going, thanks.

  16. DrXym

    My vote ratio is approaching Pi

    From my profile - "In total, your posts have been upvoted 8716 times and downvoted 2742 times."

    Sadly I'm still a little out but I'm trying to get closer by employing irrational and circular logic.

    1. DrXym

      Re: My vote ratio is approaching Pi

      Thanks for the thumbs down - pulling me towards Pi instead of away

      1. Francis Boyle Silver badge

        Re: My vote ratio is approaching Pi

        Sorry, I upvoted that because it amused me. If it helps I could downvote a few of your past posts.

  17. Tim Roberts 1

    reminds me of a limerick

    It has long been a passion of mine

    a new value for pi to assign

    I'd fix it at three

    'cos it's easier you see

    than 3.14159

    Sadly I cannot claim authorship of this one but I'll drink to the person who did.

  18. Mark 85
    Pint

    So many options for dates to recognize Pi Day...

    and thus more options for hoisting a frothy one... I've counted 3 days for this so far.... Looks to be a productive year.

  19. raving angry loony

    Correction...

    Shouldn't that be "time to celebrate American Pi"? Seeing as the date convention required for this to work is one that's used by the USA and, I believe, Belize. That's it. It's only seen in Canada because it's so dominated by American corporations, but it's not actually a standard in Canada at all. So yeah, "American Pi". Enjoy.

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: Correction...

      Bye Bye Miss American Pi,

      We'll celebrate ours in the last half of July

      22 over 7 is 3.1429

      And we all know the slash as the division sign

      So July 22nd is the new date and that's that

      Because we all hate the dumb USA date format.

  20. Bill Gray

    Oh, lighten up already!

    Yes, it's a silly idea. Yes, month/day/year is silly (I say as a Yank; as an astronomer, I think YYYY/MM/DD is the only sensible way to go). However, observing Pi Day gives me an opportunity to indoctrinate my 8-year old daughter in her cultural heritage as a budding math nerd, and I can usually persuade my wife to make a pie in celebration. I have no qualms about double-dipping and making use of DD/MM ordering to celebrate 22/7 as Pi Approximation Day, observed with a not-pie-like dish such as a quiche.

    I understand the joy of bashing Yanks, and there are many good reasons to do so (insert comments involving beer, politics, and spelling here). This, I submit, is not one of them.

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: Oh, lighten up already!

      Love the pie approximation idea, that is utterly brilliant (although the corollary is that the interval in which you can eat an actual pie is infinitesimally short).

      The Yank-bashing in this thread is just a bit of light-hearted nerdy banter, which - in this case - is richly deserved. First line of www.piday.org says: "Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world"

      Get them to change that to in the USA and Belize and you might have a point :-)

      Seriously, tho[ugh], American nerds should campaign for that date format to be abolished, just as European nerds should for DD/MM/YYYY: these formats are effectively ambiguous for 36.2% of the time!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh, lighten up already!

      " This, I submit, is not one of them."

      It is however one which can lead to genuine confusion that matters. The possibility of USA format dates in a screen-scraping trawl of web sites slows it down considerably.

      The algorithm needs human intervention for any date with day/month fields that both have values <= 12. As some US sites do not use the USA format then the country of origin cannot be used as a tie-breaker. Similarly other countries' sites advertising USA tours may give the dates in USA format.

    3. The First Dave

      Re: Pi Approximation Day

      Sorry, but 22/7 is a much _closer_ approximation to the one true value of Pi than 3.14 is.

  21. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

    The American-centric universe

    I had to laugh when I received an email from an American company promoting special offers for "International Pi Day".

    "International" as in "World Series" I imagine.

    1. Valiant

      Re: The American-centric universe

      @Jason

      I appreciate the general sentiment, but it's unfair to cite "World Series" as an example of American insularity.

      The World Series was named after (for?!) its first sponsor, a now-defunct eponymous newspaper.

      1. Martin Budden Silver badge

        Re: The American-centric universe

        The World Series was named after (for?!) its first sponsor, a now-defunct eponymous newspaper.

        Sorry but that's not true: www.snopes.com/business/names/worldseries.asp

  22. harmjschoonhoven

    The proper value of pi

    From Notes by an Oxford Chiel by Lewis Carroll, The new method of evaluation as applied to π.

    In the early treatizes on this subject, the mean value assigned to π will be found to be 40.000000. Later writers suspected that the decimal point had been accidentally shifted, and that the proper value was 400.00000.

  23. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Facepalm

    pi and pie: pronounced in the same way in Amurrica

    Wolfram added that there is plenty of confusion between pi and pie, given that they are pronounced in the same way.

    What the hell is wring with people?

  24. veti Silver badge

    Couldn't wait, huh?

    Even by American date-writing conventions - next year's "March 14th" will be closer to accurate. Unless you're in the habit of rounding down from ".9".

    1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

      Re: Rounding down from "9"

      Bankers Rounding dictates that you round to the nearest even number, (upwards or downwards as the case may be), therefore not falling into the generally accepted meaning of the word "habitual".

      1. John H Woods Silver badge

        Re: Rounding down from "9"

        "Bankers Rounding dictates that you round to the nearest even number" -- Ken Moorhouse

        Pretty sure that's not quite right ... 2.9 does not get rounded to 2, surely? I think you only round to the nearest even when you are at exactly 0.5, i.e. 2.5 is 2 and so is 1.5. My maths is rusty but I think that means that you can never use the rule when rounding a irrational number.

        1. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

          Re: Pretty sure that's not quite right ... 2.9 does not get rounded to 2, surely?

          Do a search for Bankers Rounding on your favourite search engine and the explanation will hopefully become clearer.

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