Happy Pi Approximation Day!

3.14. Of course. Happy Pi Day!

The math faculty here celebrated with free pie and a pi recitation contest at 1:59 pm (needless to say). Alas, I missed out: dragging my sleep-deprived self to and fro between classes as usual, and went back to my room for a nap instead (blasphemous, I know). Besides, (unlike most decent math students), I can't recite pi to the nth digit, where for every positive integer K you can probably find someone who can recite the digits of pi to n > K places.

My philosophy: for numerical calculations, pi is approximately equal to 3.14 (ok, 3.14159 for those who like that cheer about trigonometric functions). That's good enough, since we are approximating anyway. For exact solutions, it is a crime to use a decimal as an expression for pi. A crime, I say!

Amusingly, the statistics professor had decorated our second midterm with pi symbols, analogous to the hearts adorning the first midterm (which, readers may recall, occured on Valentine's Day). We all love a thoughtful professor! Incidentally, one of the problems did have a solution involving pi (using Stirling's approximation).