FPS Celebrates Pi Day

What’s your favourite number? Ours is 3.14159265359 … shall we go on?

That’s right, we’re talking about pi, that special, never-ending number that has provided so much to mathematics, engineering, and of course, HDD. Pi is central to our work in trenchless design, especially calculating bend radii for design and construction – we work with our favourite Greek letter every day – and we take for granted the ease with which it allows us to complete our designs.

So that’s why on 14 March (3/14 – get it?), Future-Proof Solutions takes the time to mark this most important of mathematical constants, by celebrating Pi Day. This Saturday, the Future-Proof Solutions team will be getting together with our friends and families to make, bake and eat our favourite pies, as well as heading to our favourite pie shops, in honour of our mathematical hero and champion HDD pie eaters everywhere. They know who they are!

So what’s so special about pi? Lots of things:

Pi opens up myriad mathematical opportunities related to circles and curvature. Needless to say, this is extremely important to HDD design! Pi is most simply defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (ie, the diameter of the circle fits around its circumference π times), but pi is also central to calculating radians, radii, degrees, arcs, sectors, and so on.
Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it has a decimal that is infinite in its digits. The decimal also never settles into a repeating pattern as it continues forever.
You might not use it yourself, but you have benefited immeasurably from pi. It’s used in calculations for building and engineering, physics, medicine, air travel … the list goes on.
The current Guinness world record for the most accurate value of pi (ie, the most digits calculated) is held by Emma Haruka Iwao and a team at Google, with 31,415,926,535,897 digits – that’s more than 31 trillion digits (and notice the pattern). The team achieved the record using y-cruncher, a specialist program for calculating mathematical constants.
The current Guinness world record for most digits of pi memorised is 70,000, by Rajveer Meena. Reciting the digits to achieve the record took nearly 10 hours.
Pi was first approximated in ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilisations, and Archimedes first created an algorithm for calculating it in 250 BC. This ancient mathematics has formed the foundation for the sophisticated calculations we can complete today with ease.

Do you like pi (or pie)? If so, why not join us in celebration of this amazing number this Pi Day, Saturday 14 March.