(cam) Archimedes' Constant

Nerds around the world have long yearned for a holiday to call their own. Children often balk and whine over the injustice of cosmic imbalance caused by the existence of both a Father's and a Mother's day and lack of a Kid's day (this despite the fact that every god forsaken day of the first eighteen years of your life is Kid's day for your parents, you ungrateful whelps). It is the same with nerds. So-called “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” is probably the closest they'll ever get, though historical accuracy would demand most conversations on this day be on the subject of theft, rape, and murder and not be in English.

But today is another close contender. March 14th, when properly rendered in the American date format, is 3-14, or the approximate value of π, Archimedes' Constant. Perhaps the second most important number in all of mathematics, pi is defined as the ratio between ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle. There's no obvious reason why this should be a constant, but it is. Furthermore, pi is irrational, meaning it cannot be written as a fraction (though 22/7, 333/106, or 104348/33215 will do in a pinch). Pi is thus an endless decimal, always continuing and never repeating itself. Once more there's no obvious reason why a seemingly simple property of circles should exhibit this feature. Of course, the square root of two is also irrational, so it's not such a big deal.

Pi has an even more special property: it is a transcendental number. This peculiar trait means that pi is not the zero of any polynomial with integer coefficients. Any square root or other radical is not transcendental (for example, the polynomial x^2-2 has a zero at +/- root 2). It's pretty hard to think of a number that is obviously transcendental, and probably just as hard to think of why anyone would care about roots of polynomials (isn't this something we left behind in Algebra 2?) It is sufficient for me to say that the transcendental nature of pi is the reason for the long-known impossibility of the geometric problem of Squaring the Circle.

The world-record holder for recitation of the digits of Pi is from (take a guess) China. Over a period of 24 hours he rattled off over 60,000 digits of this beast of a number. In 2006 someone from India sped through 43,000 digits in under 5 and a half hours. That is over 2 numbers per second. Yet one of the more impressive tributes to this great number (which, by the way, the ancient Greeks would have pronounced “pee”, though the first use of the π symbol was in the eighteenth century) is a poetic invocation of Edgar Allan Poe called Near A Raven. For the more advanced, new heights of nerdiness are reached by the same author in a twisted muddle of grammar, lovelorn agony, the bygone internet, and high mathematics entitled alt.Poe.versifications.experimentalize!.AANVVVize!.do!. Read with caution.