Demonstrations for Pi Day

March 7th, 2008 | Categories: general math, mathematica, Wolfram Demonstrations | Tags:

Next Friday will be March 14th which is celebrated by some as Pi Day since the date is 3/14 in American date format and the first three digits of Pi are 3.14 (as if I have to tell you!). One or two people have been looking for inspiration as to what to do for Pi Day in schools and I thought that it would be fun to write a Wolfram Demonstration especially for Pi Day, after all, my Valentine’s day demonstrations turned out to be quite popular.

So the question that remained to be answered was “what demonstration should I write?”

I have already written a post about making music out of the digits of Pi and discovered that a great demonstration had been written by Hector Zenil so there was no point in thinking about that.

How about Buffon’s needle? That’s a fun problem that leads to an approximation of Pi. Unfortunately for me – this is a demonstration that has already been written.

Perhaps I could do something that looked at the randomness in the digits of Pi? After all – this blog IS called walking randomly and I haven’t looked at randomness very much yet. Unfortunately I have been beaten to this one too (By Stephen Wolfram himself no less).

My next thought was to consider some series that would sum up to approximations of Pi. Again – it’s been done.

In addition to these three there are many others such as

That’s a lot of Pi and I have only just gotten started. All in all I am stumped – I have no idea of a demonstration I might write for Pi Day but if you can think of something then let me know and I will see what I can do :) (Oh and I will make sure that you get credit for your idea when I submit it to the project)

  1. March 8th, 2008 at 01:23
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Ah, but can you use Mathematica to make and then decorate Easter eggs? (I spent the morning doing just that.) Or maybe a whole basket full? Here is a repository of egg shape equations.

  2. March 8th, 2008 at 07:18
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Well, I still wish that one WD on musical math would include some rational numbers with repeating and terminating decimals and the number e. That involves pi. Does that count?

    Also, I’d take any basic tutorial that takes me from ground zero to a working WD involving graphs.