HAPPY PI DAY: March 14th (3.14) is
day and all around the world mathematicians are
celebrating this compelling and mysterious constant of Nature.
Pi appears in equations describing the orbits of planets, the colors of auroras, the structure of DNA. It's everywhere.
Humans have been
struggling to calculate
for thousands of years. Divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter; the ratio is
. Sounds simple, but the devil is in the digits. While the value of
is finite (a smidgen more than 3), the decimal number is infinitely long: