Happy Pi Day!

In an apt demonstration of the principle of Relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the bawdy platter, and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position vis-a-vis Daniel, and hence were, in principle, just as edible, as if he had been seated before, and the pies had been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London. Daniel guessed that they were swinging round the northern limb of St. Paul's Churchyard, but he had no real way of telling; he had closed the window-shutters, for the reason that their journey to Bedlam would take them directly across the maw of Grub Street, and he did not want to read about today's adventure in all tomorrow's papers.

Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie - as if being in astate of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still; position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his, Daniel's, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity - e.g. being hurled at his face - then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it.

Mr Cat had lent them silver table-settings, and Daniel, as he spoke, had tucked a napkin into his shirt-collar - a flag of surrender, and an unconditional capitulations to the attractions of Pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up - knife and fork. Isaac's question froze him just as he poised there above the flaky top-crust....

.... Daniel tossed down his flatware and began cleaning himself up with his napkin, whilst scanning the little poem that - by long standing Kit-Cat tradition - had been carved into the bottom crust;

Ye Product of Pie & ye Radius, Squared,
Doth yield the Size of the Pan,
An area vast enough to've been Shared,
Not gobbled entire by One Man!

Ramon wrote:Reforming our broken public education system 3.14... steps at a time ...

-ramon

"I know it will be called blasphemy by some, but I believe that pi is wrong."

That's the opening line of a watershed essay written in 2001 by mathematician Bob Palais of the University of Utah. In "Pi is Wrong!" Palais argued that, for thousands of years, humans have been focusing their attention and adulation on the wrong mathematical constant.

Two times pi, not pi itself, is the truly sacred number of the circle, Palais contended. We should be celebrating and symbolizing the value that is equal to approximately 6.28 — the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius — and not to the 3.14'ish ratio of its circumference to its diameter (a largely irrelevant property in geometry).

Last year, Palais' followers gave the new constant, 2pi, a name: tau. Since then, the tau movement has steadily grown, with its members hoping to replace pi as it appears in textbooks and calculators with tau, the true idol of math. Yesterday — 6/28 — they even celebrated Tau Day in math events worldwide.

pairs4life wrote:In anticipation of Pi Day this week and noting that this month’s Dessert Exchange had the appropriate theme, how do you plan to celebrate the day?

pairs4life wrote:In anticipation of Pi Day this week and noting that this month’s Dessert Exchange had the appropriate theme, how do you plan to celebrate the day?