You may have noticed that here at The Aperiodical, we’ve been posting exciting π-related items all week – and here’s a list of them all, collected into one handy place. Enjoy!
Pi Day 2015: The Aperiodical goes π mad
π and constrained writing
It’s a tool; a ratio, providing us simple rules for doing circular estimates. Admired regularly – and we all remember that today’s pi! Hooray! Let’s eat pie. You may have noticed that the first paragraph of this article was immensely poorly written, and didn’t sound like good writing at all. And you’d be right –…
Interesting π Esoterica
My way of celebrating π day is to rummage through my trove of obscure writings and dig up some interesting esoterica on the subject of that constant. Here’s what I found. In case you’re new to this: every now and then I encounter a paper or a book or an article that grabs my interest but isn’t directly…
Pi Day on Twitter
We can’t hope to keep up with all the π action around the internet today, so here’s a live stream of #piday tweets. #piday Tweets
I bought three.onefouronefivenine.com
I’m a big fan of novelty domain names: I once bought hotmathematicians.com just so that christian@hotmathematicians.com could be my corresponding address when I submitted a paper. That domain has expired, but my love for one-shot novelty purchases has not! To celebrate π day this year, I decided that it should be possible to type a little…
π approximation: Machin’s formula
In the excellent $\pi$ approximation video, Katie Steckles asked for $\pi$ approximations. I teach a first year techniques module (mostly calculus and a little complex numbers and linear algebra). This year I have changed a few bits in my module; in particular I gave some of my more numerical topics to the numerical methods module…
π and the Mysterious Excel Function
Users of Microsoft’s flagship 2D-array-based data-organisation tool Excel will be aware of some if its more recondite functions. From the occasionally useful RIGHT: returns the substring of a given length from the right-hand end of a cell’s contents to the wilfully obscure TBILLPRICE: gives “the price per $100 face value for a Treasury bill” when supplied…