Resonant Constellation

Today, 3/14, is a special day. That’s right, it’s Pi day! Today is the day to celebrate the gloriousness of the mathematical constant pi. Let’s consider:

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
5820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982
1480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811
1745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196442881
0975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566
9234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066
0631558817488152092096282925409171536436789259036001
1330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759
5919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495
6735188575272489122793818301194912983367336244065664
3086021394946395224737190702179860943702770539217176
2931767523846748184676694051320005681271452635608277
8577134275778960917363717872146844090122495343014654
9585371050792279689258923542019956112129021960864034
4181598136297747713099605187072114999999…and so on.

Ha ha! Pi is really irrational, it doesn’t continue with a string of nines forever (or does it? You’ll have to find out…). But anyway, pi day is a really special day for a lot of people. Today is Albert Einstien’s birthday for one, which is reason enough to celebrate, but on a more personal note, today is the anniversary of two very good friends of mine (one is a math teacher and the other is a physics student). For all these reasons, Pi day is one of my ever growing list of “Science Holidays,” (for example: Apple day or Gravmas, Issac Newton’s birthday. Which also happens to be Christmas.) I urge you to celebrate-bake a pie in the shape of pi, do some relativity, study brownian motion, there’s tons of things you could do!

Note: The point in pi at which I stopped (…999999…) is a very special sequence, known as the Feynman point. In a lecture once, Feynman said he wanted to memorize pi up until a point when he could say “Nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, and so on,” implying that pi is rational and ends in a repeated sequence of nines. This is typical Feynman awesomeness. The fact that this sequence occurs so early in pi (starts at digit 762) is truly intriguing. Read more here.