Happy Pi Day - The Orange Mane

footstepsfrom#27 · 03-14-2007, 09:18 AM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/...e_church_of_pi

Pi fans to meet March 14 (3.14, get it?)

By ERIN McCLAM, AP National Writer
Sun Mar 11, 9:37 PM ET

This is a story about love. About inscrutable complexity and remarkable simplicity, about the promise of forever. It is about obsession and devotion, and grand gestures and 4,000-word love letters.

It is about a curious group of people with an almost religious zeal for a mind-numbing string of numbers. Actually one number, made up of a chain that is known — so far — to be more than one trillion digits long. They are the acolytes of the church of pi.

And once a year many of them gather to talk about pi, rhapsodize about it, eat pi-themed foods (actual pie, sure, but so much more), have pi recitation contests and, just maybe, feel a little less sheepish about their unusual passion.

That day falls on Wednesday this year: March 14. Or 3.14. Obviously.

The question is why, of course. And if you ask the fans of pi why, a startling number of them will come back with the same question: "Why climb Mount Everest?" Because it's there.

But then they start talking about some very simple ideas. Like the beauty of a number that seems to go on forever and yet has no discernible pattern to it. Or about the valor of the memorization gymnastics, challenging oneself always to know more.

This is how Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old mental health counselor in Japan, puts it: "What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures. I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi."

He said this one day last fall after accurately reciting pi to 100,000 decimal places. It took him 16 hours. He does not hold the Guinness world record, only because he has not submitted the required documentation to Guinness. But he has his story.

(Incidentally, the world record belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness.)

A brief math refresher: Pi a simple concept, the relationship between a circle's circumference and diameter: Multiply the diameter by pi — 3.14159, to use a crude approximation that would make many of the people in this story blanch — and you get the circumference.

Supercomputers have computed pi to more than a trillion decimal places, looking always for a pattern to unlock its mystery. And for centuries the number has fascinated mathematicians.

And then there are people like Marc Umile. Twelve years ago, while working as an usher at a Philadelphia opera house, he picked up a book on curiosities of math and read about pi's seemingly infinite, random string.

He wondered about applying the way we absorb music to the mystical number. An obsession was born. In 2004 Umile read the digits of pi into a tape recorder. He did it a thousand at a time and gave it a rhythm — some numbers high-toned, some low.

He listened to the tape constantly. This went on for two years. A two-year trance. "To and from work, in my quiet time, on my lunch break — and when I didn't have the tape I would recite in the shower," he says. "Probably 40 percent of the time there was an earphone in my ear. I said, `Oh my God, what have I created?'"

What he created was what is believed to be U.S. record for pi memorization — 12,887 digits. He typed them into a spreadsheet at a Philadelphia law office — three-and-a-half hours, 1,000 numbers at a time, with two smoke breaks.

Umile, who is 40 and now works as a Medicare biller, believes the fascination with pi has something to do with our desire to learn the ultimate truth of something. Each decimal place, in theory, takes you 10 times closer to the answer.

He says he made a mistake in his training: He told too many people what he was up to. His wife, his family — they were rooting for him. Most of the rest dismissed him as a weirdo.

"I have a delicate confidence level in a way," he says. "Maybe I don't believe in myself too much. If you do something of this magnitude, keep it a secret. Don't tell anybody what you're doing."

Others are less shy about their fixation.

A software engineer in Virginia named Mike Keith wrote a poem to pi, a "piem." A love letter, in a way. To say that it is a something to behold is an understatement: It is nearly 4,000 words long — and the length in letters of each word corresponds to pi's digits.

In other words, if you can remember the poem — which riffs on T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Act V of "Hamlet" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," among other texts — you too can recite pi.

"One: A Poem: A Raven," it begins (3-1-4-1-5). "Midnights so dreary, tired and weary, silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore. During my rather long nap — the weirdest tap! An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor."

And so on.

Keith says he thinks of himself only as "an average pi nut." He figures he knows maybe 100 pi digits off the top of his head. "My daughter knows about 50," he adds. "She's 15."

There are logical gathering places for people like this, and one of them is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, on March 14, students have been known to wish each other — out loud — a happy Pi Day.

The school plays a role in encouraging this: In the past it has tried to mail its acceptance letters on March 14. (It didn't work out this year. And last year, when an MIT official wrote on an admissions blog that it probably wouldn't work out then either, he was greeted with disappointment. "Pi Day seems so romantic," one prospective student wrote.)

There's a popular chant, an MIT rallying cry, that includes "3.14159." (It rhymes with "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!" And Bryan Owens, an MIT senior, says the ability to recite pi is a sort of bragging right, a coin of the realm.

"It's like how much money you have," he says. "But you never win. You always find somebody who knows it to more digits than you do. I think the basic idea is we like to celebrate things, kind of celebrate who we are."

And that is why, like the Irish on St. Patrick's Day or Italians on Columbus Day, this Wednesday, 3-14, in many cases at 1:59 p.m., pi enthusiasts will have their moment in the sun.

At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, there will be pies to eat, people wearing pi jewelry, more beads — color-coded by digit — added to the pi string. And the celebrants will gather at a sort of pi shrine, a brass plaque engraved with pi's first 100 digits.

It may be a stretch to say that pi has achieved a kind of cultural cachet, but it is true that, as an obsession, it's not just for math geeks anymore. Givenchy makes a Pi perfume. Kate Bush sings out its digits in a song. And — of course — YouTube stocks videos of people reading pi into the camera.

Umile, the pi-chanting Medicare biller who struggled with self-confidence, is already booked to appear on a local TV show on Wednesday. The other night he rattled off 10,000 pi digits, just to keep the gears oiled.

Funny thing, though: For the life of him, he can't remember the phone number he calls every month to make his mortgage payment. And the other day he got his own bank account number wrong.

"It starts with 6-1-4," he says. "And I wrote 3-1-4."

On the Net:

Mike Keith's pi poem: http://users.aol.com/s6sj7gt/cadtext.htm

OrangeShadow · 03-14-2007, 10:02 AM

the offseason threads just hit a new low

Hogan11 · 03-14-2007, 10:15 AM

pi day? That's Saturday for me...I'm rockin' in St. Pat's Day w/ The Pietasters

-Slap- · 03-14-2007, 10:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OrangeShadow

the offseason threads just hit a new low

You know, I was debating whether I should post specific details about the unusual bowel movement I had this morning, but I no longer harbor such reservations. Anticipate a complete account forthwith.

Garcia Bronco · 03-14-2007, 10:34 AM

You guys joke too much...Pi is awesome.

One of the best Simpson jokes revolves around Pi. Or at least I enjoyed it.

TailgateNut · 03-14-2007, 11:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garcia Bronco

Pi is awesome.

You NEED A LIFE!

Open the blinds and be AMAZED at the world outside!

Billy Clyde Puckett · 03-14-2007, 11:14 AM

I'm taking a diameter to lunch to celebrate

TailgateNut · 03-14-2007, 11:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Big Guy

I'm taking a diameter to lunch to celebrate

...and I have a date with the radius...

Garcia Bronco · 03-14-2007, 12:04 PM

What was the last math class you guys took?

Mine was Multi-variable vector calculus, College Geometry(not what you think), and Mathmatical Induction.

Garcia Bronco · 03-14-2007, 12:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TailgateNut

You NEED A LIFE!

Open the blinds and be AMAZED at the world outside!

OMG...there is Pie outside too.

TailgateNut · 03-14-2007, 12:10 PM

I love peach pie.

TailgateNut · 03-14-2007, 12:11 PM

Happy "Hump day"!

BroncoBuff · 03-14-2007, 12:17 PM

Actually, I'm with footsteps and GB (gad).

Pi is a very special thing .... with quasi-spiritual overtones, for me at least.

Pi, Phi, The Fibbonacci Sequence, Fractals, quantum mechanics (specifically Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), the big bang and the singularity in atsrophysics (Max Planck's "constant"), are all evidence of God - whatever God you envision - winking at us.

KCbroncos · 03-14-2007, 01:34 PM

A much more important holiday today.

http://www.steakandbjday.com/

Houshyamama · 03-14-2007, 01:46 PM

Pi the Movie, good flick:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JRgIbKEsYT4

Rock Chalk · 03-14-2007, 02:05 PM

Today is also Steak and BJ Day.

Aka Male Valentines Day.

atomicbloke · 03-14-2007, 02:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TailgateNut

You NEED A LIFE!

Open the blinds and be AMAZED at the world outside!

Pi transcends life.

The number is universal throughout the universe. Take any sphere and divide by the radius and the number will be the same.

It's the secret of the cosmos

atomicbloke · 03-14-2007, 02:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garcia Bronco

What was the last math class you guys took?

Mine was Multi-variable vector calculus, College Geometry(not what you think), and Mathmatical Induction.

Huh?

A whole class on mathematical induction?

Flex Gunmetal · 03-14-2007, 02:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KCbroncos

A much more important holiday today.

http://www.steakandbjday.com/

Beat me to it

I can't wait to celebrate

Garcia Bronco · 03-14-2007, 02:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by atomicbloke

Huh?

A whole class on mathematical induction?

Yes..there were a few other topics covered, but it was 90 percent induction.

LonghornBronco · 03-14-2007, 02:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Garcia Bronco

What was the last math class you guys took?

Mine was Multi-variable vector calculus, College Geometry(not what you think), and Mathmatical Induction.

Finite Element Analysis....

Garcia Bronco · 03-14-2007, 02:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LonghornBronco

Finite Element Analysis....

Cool.

The finite element analysis was first developed in 1943 by Richard Courant, who used the Ritz method of numerical analysis and minimization of variational calculus to obtain approximate solutions to vibration systems. Shortly thereafter, a paper published in 1956[1] established a broader definition of numerical analysis. Development of the finite element method in structural mechanics is usually based on an energy principle such as the virtual work principle or the minimum total potential energy principle.

worm · 03-14-2007, 02:43 PM

Hair Pie!

Los Broncos · 03-14-2007, 04:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KCbroncos

A much more important holiday today.

http://www.steakandbjday.com/

Sassy · 03-14-2007, 05:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hogan11

pi day? That's Saturday for me...I'm rockin' in St. Pat's Day w/ The Pietasters

Somehow, I knew, the Tasters would be in a comment here!

03-14-2007, 09:18 AM	#1
footstepsfrom#27 helmet to helmet hitter Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: Arlington, TX Posts: 16,117 Adopt-a-Bronco: Joe Mays	Happy Pi Day http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/...e_church_of_pi Pi fans to meet March 14 (3.14, get it?) By ERIN McCLAM, AP National Writer Sun Mar 11, 9:37 PM ET This is a story about love. About inscrutable complexity and remarkable simplicity, about the promise of forever. It is about obsession and devotion, and grand gestures and 4,000-word love letters. It is about a curious group of people with an almost religious zeal for a mind-numbing string of numbers. Actually one number, made up of a chain that is known — so far — to be more than one trillion digits long. They are the acolytes of the church of pi. And once a year many of them gather to talk about pi, rhapsodize about it, eat pi-themed foods (actual pie, sure, but so much more), have pi recitation contests and, just maybe, feel a little less sheepish about their unusual passion. That day falls on Wednesday this year: March 14. Or 3.14. Obviously. The question is why, of course. And if you ask the fans of pi why, a startling number of them will come back with the same question: "Why climb Mount Everest?" Because it's there. But then they start talking about some very simple ideas. Like the beauty of a number that seems to go on forever and yet has no discernible pattern to it. Or about the valor of the memorization gymnastics, challenging oneself always to know more. This is how Akira Haraguchi, a 60-year-old mental health counselor in Japan, puts it: "What I am aiming at is not just memorizing figures. I am thrilled by seeking a story in pi." He said this one day last fall after accurately reciting pi to 100,000 decimal places. It took him 16 hours. He does not hold the Guinness world record, only because he has not submitted the required documentation to Guinness. But he has his story. (Incidentally, the world record belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness.) A brief math refresher: Pi a simple concept, the relationship between a circle's circumference and diameter: Multiply the diameter by pi — 3.14159, to use a crude approximation that would make many of the people in this story blanch — and you get the circumference. Supercomputers have computed pi to more than a trillion decimal places, looking always for a pattern to unlock its mystery. And for centuries the number has fascinated mathematicians. And then there are people like Marc Umile. Twelve years ago, while working as an usher at a Philadelphia opera house, he picked up a book on curiosities of math and read about pi's seemingly infinite, random string. He wondered about applying the way we absorb music to the mystical number. An obsession was born. In 2004 Umile read the digits of pi into a tape recorder. He did it a thousand at a time and gave it a rhythm — some numbers high-toned, some low. He listened to the tape constantly. This went on for two years. A two-year trance. "To and from work, in my quiet time, on my lunch break — and when I didn't have the tape I would recite in the shower," he says. "Probably 40 percent of the time there was an earphone in my ear. I said, `Oh my God, what have I created?'" What he created was what is believed to be U.S. record for pi memorization — 12,887 digits. He typed them into a spreadsheet at a Philadelphia law office — three-and-a-half hours, 1,000 numbers at a time, with two smoke breaks. Umile, who is 40 and now works as a Medicare biller, believes the fascination with pi has something to do with our desire to learn the ultimate truth of something. Each decimal place, in theory, takes you 10 times closer to the answer. He says he made a mistake in his training: He told too many people what he was up to. His wife, his family — they were rooting for him. Most of the rest dismissed him as a weirdo. "I have a delicate confidence level in a way," he says. "Maybe I don't believe in myself too much. If you do something of this magnitude, keep it a secret. Don't tell anybody what you're doing." Others are less shy about their fixation. A software engineer in Virginia named Mike Keith wrote a poem to pi, a "piem." A love letter, in a way. To say that it is a something to behold is an understatement: It is nearly 4,000 words long — and the length in letters of each word corresponds to pi's digits. In other words, if you can remember the poem — which riffs on T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Act V of "Hamlet" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," among other texts — you too can recite pi. "One: A Poem: A Raven," it begins (3-1-4-1-5). "Midnights so dreary, tired and weary, silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore. During my rather long nap — the weirdest tap! An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor." And so on. Keith says he thinks of himself only as "an average pi nut." He figures he knows maybe 100 pi digits off the top of his head. "My daughter knows about 50," he adds. "She's 15." There are logical gathering places for people like this, and one of them is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, on March 14, students have been known to wish each other — out loud — a happy Pi Day. The school plays a role in encouraging this: In the past it has tried to mail its acceptance letters on March 14. (It didn't work out this year. And last year, when an MIT official wrote on an admissions blog that it probably wouldn't work out then either, he was greeted with disappointment. "Pi Day seems so romantic," one prospective student wrote.) There's a popular chant, an MIT rallying cry, that includes "3.14159." (It rhymes with "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine!" And Bryan Owens, an MIT senior, says the ability to recite pi is a sort of bragging right, a coin of the realm. "It's like how much money you have," he says. "But you never win. You always find somebody who knows it to more digits than you do. I think the basic idea is we like to celebrate things, kind of celebrate who we are." And that is why, like the Irish on St. Patrick's Day or Italians on Columbus Day, this Wednesday, 3-14, in many cases at 1:59 p.m., pi enthusiasts will have their moment in the sun. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, there will be pies to eat, people wearing pi jewelry, more beads — color-coded by digit — added to the pi string. And the celebrants will gather at a sort of pi shrine, a brass plaque engraved with pi's first 100 digits. It may be a stretch to say that pi has achieved a kind of cultural cachet, but it is true that, as an obsession, it's not just for math geeks anymore. Givenchy makes a Pi perfume. Kate Bush sings out its digits in a song. And — of course — YouTube stocks videos of people reading pi into the camera. Umile, the pi-chanting Medicare biller who struggled with self-confidence, is already booked to appear on a local TV show on Wednesday. The other night he rattled off 10,000 pi digits, just to keep the gears oiled. Funny thing, though: For the life of him, he can't remember the phone number he calls every month to make his mortgage payment. And the other day he got his own bank account number wrong. "It starts with 6-1-4," he says. "And I wrote 3-1-4." On the Net: Mike Keith's pi poem: http://users.aol.com/s6sj7gt/cadtext.htm

03-14-2007, 02:43 PM	#23
worm Great moments are born... ...from great opportunity Join Date: Dec 2002 Posts: 3,947 Adopt-a-Bronco: #20	Hair Pie! Attached Images

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03-14-2007, 10:02 AM	#2
OrangeShadow armed and dangerous Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 6,771	the offseason threads just hit a new low

03-14-2007, 10:15 AM	#3
Hogan11 Rock-N-Roll Historian Let's take these SOB's out!!!!!! Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: W.NY.B.C. Posts: 21,300 Adopt-a-Bronco: Floyd Little	pi day? That's Saturday for me...I'm rockin' in St. Pat's Day w/ The Pietasters

03-14-2007, 10:34 AM	#5
Garcia Bronco Hokie since 1993 Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 45,987 Adopt-a-Bronco: Tom Jackson	You guys joke too much...Pi is awesome. One of the best Simpson jokes revolves around Pi. Or at least I enjoyed it.

03-14-2007, 11:14 AM	#7
Billy Clyde Puckett Billy=Semi Tough Big Guy Looking down on KC, SD and Oakland Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: between 5,000 and 10,000 feet elevation Posts: 12,665 Adopt-a-Bronco: John Elway	I'm taking a diameter to lunch to celebrate

03-14-2007, 12:04 PM	#9
Garcia Bronco Hokie since 1993 Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 45,987 Adopt-a-Bronco: Tom Jackson	What was the last math class you guys took? Mine was Multi-variable vector calculus, College Geometry(not what you think), and Mathmatical Induction.

03-14-2007, 12:10 PM	#11
TailgateNut Bleedin' orange! .......as much as tebonites Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Mile High Posts: 20,018 Adopt-a-Bronco: Howard Griffith	I love peach pie.

03-14-2007, 12:11 PM	#12
TailgateNut Bleedin' orange! .......as much as tebonites Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Mile High Posts: 20,018 Adopt-a-Bronco: Howard Griffith	Happy "Hump day"!

03-14-2007, 12:17 PM	#13
BroncoBuff *************** Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Seattle Posts: 25,433 Adopt-a-Bronco: QUANTERUS SMITH	Actually, I'm with footsteps and GB (gad). Pi is a very special thing .... with quasi-spiritual overtones, for me at least. Pi, Phi, The Fibbonacci Sequence, Fractals, quantum mechanics (specifically Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), the big bang and the singularity in atsrophysics (Max Planck's "constant"), are all evidence of God - whatever God you envision - winking at us.

03-14-2007, 01:34 PM	#14
KCbroncos Solid Starter Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: Shawnee, KS (Burb of Marienthal, KS) Posts: 154	A much more important holiday today. http://www.steakandbjday.com/

03-14-2007, 01:46 PM	#15
Houshyamama I Make The Weather Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: San Diego Posts: 3,853 Adopt-a-Bronco: Brock Osweiler	Pi the Movie, good flick: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JRgIbKEsYT4

03-14-2007, 02:05 PM	#16
Rock Chalk Cheeky Bastards Laus Deo Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: The Backside of the Internet Posts: 29,940 Adopt-a-Bronco: Chris Harris	Today is also Steak and BJ Day. Aka Male Valentines Day.