Pi Day and an Interview With a Pi Researcher

JoshuaInNippon writes "In honor of Pi Day, March 14 (or 3.14 for those who may need a hint), readers may be interested in reading an interview with Professor Daisuke Takahashi, the Japanese researcher who found 2.5 trillion digits of Pi back in August, before being apparently being edged out in December by a French computer programmer looking to prove his efficient coding abilities. Professor Takahashi's interview gives some unique insight into one man who truly marvels at the number that has driven people to ever greater lengths to find more digits for centuries." Plant Kingdom adds "There have been a number of proposals for alternatives to March 14 (see the Wikipedia page for Pi Day). Here's mine: when the Earth has gone through 1/pi-th of its orbit, as measured from Winter Solstice to Winter Solstice. I've put together a web site to make the case."

Comments

I don't get it

[Hognoxious]

Huh? Pi isn't 14.3 or 14/3.

Re:I don't get it

[mrsquid0]

No, day-month-year is more sensible since the size of the unit is increasing monotonically. The sanest way to do it would be year-month-day, because then you could increase the precision of the time string to whatever you needed just by adding units to the right. The month-day-year system is probably the lease sensible method of the lot.

Re:I don't get it

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The month-day-year system is probably the lease sensible method of the lot.

Not to those of us who often work with dates that often land on the next month. As a friend of mine likes to say "six of one, half dozen of the other."

The sanest way to do it would be year-month-day...

This gets my vote.

Re:I don't get it

[Cimexus]

Yup, yyyy-mm-dd is the ISO standard date format for a reason. You get the advantage of easier chronological sorting (ala the US system of month/day), and the unambiguity of the unit size constantly going in one direct (in this case, largest to smallest).

Pi day?

[burris]

Judging by the big hunk of meat in my 'fridge, today is Steak and BJ Day. Pi day just isn't nearly as fun.

Re:Pi day?

[zippthorne]

Pi day is irrational, but at least it's real.

Don't forget.

[myocardialinfarction]

Don't forget it's also mother's day. And nobody makes better pi than mom. /duck

US-centricity

[garyok]

In the UK, we have to wait until the 31st April to have pi day. We'll be waiting a while...

Re:US-centricity

[mrsurb]

Don't forget to localise for differing values of pi:

#ifdef INDIANA
#define PI_VALUE 3
#endif

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

This is stupid, who thought MONTH - DAY - YEAR is a reasonable date format? Do you frequently find yourself asking "Hmm, I wonder what month it is?" And always make people look in the center to find out the date? WTF

It's like throwing away metric and using some crazy-ass divisible by 12 unit.

Re:Stupid

[Cimexus]

Bad form replying to one's self but this is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Date.png

The number of countries using the US system is pretty small. It's basically the US and a few random places like Palau and Micronesia.

But - there are quite a few variations on date format, more than I thought :)

Re:My suggestion

[jschen]

Regarding 2.7182's statement: I'm surprised you're not advocating e day (Feb 7? July 2?) instead. The combination would be good, though. Celebrate pi and e, and we get pie! How about pi + e day? At ~5.9, that would make May 9 or Sept 5 into Pie Day.

Re:Ellipse != Circle

[Ardeaem]

Pi is relevant to the circumference of circles. The earth has an elliptical orbit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumference

Um...pi is relevant to a lot of things, including ellipses. And besides, the orbit of the Earth has very low eccentricity, meaning it is very close to a circle. Who modded the parent "informative"?

RE: yeah, okay

[Anarchduke]

Oh Jesus. Really?

Okay, I'm about to troll, but...

First, do we really need a holiday for every fucking thing out there? Where the hell is dung beetle day? Aardwolf week? Permian Extinction Day?

Secondly, you invested enough energy into worrying about WHICH day should be Pi day that you created a website over it?

Finally, if Pi gets its own day, I think its entirely fair that 1.618 get its own celebration. Phi is easily as fascinating a number as Pi, so why didn't you get your panties in a twist over not having Phi day?

Sometimes, you CAN be too much of a geek.

--------------
End of Troll.

Did he find a message?

[wisebabo]

I understand that in the book "Contact" by Carl Sagan, when the scientists meets the aliens he asks them a question:

Scientist: Do you believe in God?

Aliens: Yes.

(Astonished) Scientist: Really?! Why?

Aliens: We have proof.

Scientist: Proof?!!!

Alien: Yes, when we decoded Pi to (a very large number) we found a Message...

Of course this idea was exploited in a different way by the movie "Pi". (Sorry didn't see it either.). In any case, if Pi is truly Random (it is isn't it?) won't every possible message occur? Just like those monkeys with their typewriters (if you don't know what a typewriter is look it up).

Re:Did he find a message?

[pcolaman]

What the fuck is a monkey?

Re:Did he find a message?

[jc42]

In any case, if Pi is truly Random (it is isn't it?) won't every possible message occur?

Hmmm ... You must be using an unusual definition of "random", which usually means that the value is unpredictable. Pi is the opposite of random. It's precisely defined and always has the same value for anyone who calculates it correctly. (Which leaves out the religious folks, but that's to be expected for anything requiring validity. ;-) Pi would even be the same in a different universe with different physical laws, because its value isn't dependent on anything physical.

As for every message occurring, I think you're thinking of normal numbers. There is a conjecture that pi is normal, but it hasn't been proved. So far, statistics of the digits of pi are consistent with it being normal to as many digits as have been tested. A normal number does contain every possible message, in every possible encoding. If pi is normal, then so is e. [The proof is trivial for anyone who knows the well-known equation relating e and pi.]

And yes, this mathematical (ab)use of the word "normal" is one of the silliest things that mathematicians have ever done. But there is a long tradition of such silly misuse of common words as mathematical terms.

Re:a French computer programmer?

[mukund]

OTOH, reading Bellard's FAQ on his latest result does seem like he was interested more in fast algorithms and not in Pi. So I stand corrected. Still.. he's not some random programmer to us. :P Following links from his FAQ, I found two cool books:

• Modern Computer Arithmetic by Richard Brent and Paul Zimmermann
• Matters Computational

Re:Ellipse != Circle

[noisyinstrument]

Clearly it was a case of circular logic.