3/14/23
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I could never turn down pie on March 14. That would be irrational.
Important Dates in March:
03/14 –> Pi Day
03/15 –> The Ides of March (2067th Anniversary of Caesar’s Assassination)
03/16 –> Our 9th Wedding Anniversary
03/17 –> St. Patrick’s Day
This fascination with Pi by non-STEM people is quite odd.
For me the natural logarithm is much more elegant.
Alas, 2/7 gets no press.
Serious inquiry for the math whizzes here, which I most certainly am not: How do the various formulae using “pi” achieve accuracy when the number itself requires rounding off to avoid infinite decimal places? I know my terminology is probably bad, but you get the drift. This always bothered me, but my HS math teachers couldn’t come up with a better answer than “we can get really close.”
Infinite numbers can actually more accurate. Old style electro mech meters always had register ratios that were irrational fractions.
Don’t be fooled by decimal places, there is a certain tolerance to every measurement. Like the world will warm by 2 degrees C in the next century. (Yeah, what’s the tolerance on that 2.0C +/- 1.58C ?)
Pi is irrational because it’s a constant that relates to a closed figure with infinite sides. (A circle.) Yawn, of course it’s an infinite number of decimal places. Gosh, I feel so bad for the natural log. No respect. : -)
3/16 = “John” Day (Not “John Day” as in a person . . .)
Yo Frank, it’s just that all the succeeding number in the series are smaller, so small they can be neglected. The value of pi to 10 places is 3.141592658 …. suppose you call pi 3.14; you’re off by
.001592658 or percentwise, 100 x .001592658/3.1401592658 or about .05 %.
If you add on more digits, you won’t be more correct cause they’re too small to effect your error.
make that “affect your error.”
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Thanks, David WS and Dr. K. That makes sense even to this innumerate verbalizer. Now I need to go look up the natural log. 😁