My, my, time to celebrate pi Synchronize your watches, everyone. Today, at 1:59 p.m., take a moment to celebrate the wonderful mathematical constant ? (pi). Today, March 14 (or 3/14 or 3.14) is International Pi Day. Thanks to Richard Hall for pointing out the significance of this date.
he more elegant nature of pi has been subsumed by the all important quest to crunch its numbers. The obsession perhaps began with the German mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen who, in about 1600, computed pi to the first 35 decimal places. He was so proud of his accomplishment that he had the digits inscribed on his tombstone. A life-long obsessive called William Shanks spent 20 years calculating pi to 707 decimal places. Unfortunately, his achievement was discredited when the first digital computers found that he had made a mistake at the 528th decimal place - rendering all subsequent digits meaningless.