Happy Pi Day 2016!

piIn keeping with the yearly tradition, we find it part of our mission on this earth to make bring the good news to all: Happy Pi Day 2016!

Pi Day, derived from the co-incidence of March (3) the 14th (3/14 here in the USA, and a little more-clunkily expressed as 14/3 for our friends everywhere else in the world) and the first 3 digits of Pi (3.14), is a day of gratitude, thanks, and appreciation for the magic of numbers.

We could probably get away with repeating our post from Pi Day 2008, in which we explore π, Φ, i, and e, but we have more exciting news to share today: in what’s being hailed as a possible breakthrough in mathematics, a new finding has just been published that may further our understanding of prime numbers. The study, published online to the arXiv pre-print and better-explained in Quanta Magazine remarks on a previously-unnoted property regarding prime numbers: mathematicians and amateur prime hunters alike have long-observed that prime numbers have an uncanny tendency to be found in clusters separated by massive nothingness – and now we might have a clue about how the members of the clusters relate (in a very bizarre way) with one another.

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Happy Pi Day 2011, Everyone!

It’s that time of the year again – our favorite holiday for the past decade. Pi Day. A reminder of the math geeks that have brought wisdom and light on our planet for centuries past.

Depending on who you ask, they all have different terms for Pi. Transcendental, irrational, easy, hard… but we prefer the term ‘magical.’

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2048 Comments…

Just a quick thank you to all our loyal readers, contributors, members, and commenters over the years. Our most popular blog post on the site has just reached the über-geeky number of 2048 comments in the 2 years 3 months and 23 days since it was posted. For more geeky conversions, read on.

  • 2.31 years
  • 2 years, 3 months, 23 days
  • 27 months, 24 days
  • 120 weeks, 4 days
  • 844 days

Obviously 2 years is a long time… but 2048 is an equally great number.

Thank you!

Celebrating Pi Day (and other magical numbers)

Today is Pi-Day 2008. A day in honor of Pi, one of the oldest and most mysterious mathematical constants known to man. A day in celebration of the works of dozens of great mathematicians and scholars. A day to revel in the glory and power of Pi. For those of you that live in the USA and use the MM/DD date representation format, the reason should be clear enough: March 14th, 2008 == 3.14.

Pi isn’t just a number that you can use to calculate circle-related mathematics, it’s a symbol of something by far greater. Pi is one of many magic” numbers that are found everywhere – if you know where to look. These magic numbers can’t be explained, they just are. And if you use them right, they make it a lot easier to do a lot of really complicated things… In a way, they’re a testimony to technology and computers (or vice-versa, depending on how you look at it).

Pi, i, e, and Phi are just some of the numbers that have an almost-magical role in furthering scientific and mathematical studies and observations in our daily lives. It doesn’t matter where they came from or what they actually mean; the one thing that truly counts is what you can make them do for you.

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