Tuesday, March 14, 2017

PI Day






Updated: 6:14 AM Eastern
Originally published: 6:00 AM Eastern

March 14 (click here) is recognized across the math world as Pi Day, thanks to the resemblance of the date "3/14" to the first three digits of mathematics' most famous constant. While not an official federal holiday, Pi Day was enshrined by the House of Representatives in a ceremonial 2009 vote.

Of course, the number Pi goes beyond "3.14" and never ends. There are all sorts of interesting patterns concealed in the first few trillion digits, give or take, but there is no constant rule governing the sequence of digits. That means just about any stretch of numbers you're looking for is probably in there somewhere.

Like, say, your birthday. To verify this, we wrote a program to scan the first million digits of Pi and identify the first instance of all 366 days of the year, represented like "314," with the month followed by the day ("704" for July 4th for example, or "1225" for Christmas Day"). The program found the final date — Dec. 3, or "1203" — beginning at the 60,873rd digit. Enter your birthday or any other date below and we'll show you how deep into Pi you have to go to find it....