A calculator, as not used by planet-brain mathematicians working out pi to billions of decimal points
Today is pi day, a celebration of one of the most-used yet bizarrest numbers in all of mathematics, writes Alok Jha.
Pi (which begins 3.14, hence the celebration today) represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It goes on forever, and there are no patterns in the order of the digits. Little wonder mathematicians call it an irrational number. It has its uses in countless physics equations, endless mathematical formulae and near-infinite engineering problems.
Before this starts sounding like a maths lesson, we should point out that the number is rooted in plenty of popular culture. Kate Bush sang the first 137 digits in a song, titled π, on her recent album, Aerial (although some people accuse her of getting the numbers wrong); Carl Sagan wrote about the possibility of findig a fingerprint of God in a version of pi; and Professor Frink (of The Simpsons fame) shouts "pi is exactly 3" to get the attention of a bunch of scientists.
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