{"id":76,"date":"2008-03-07T12:57:04","date_gmt":"2008-03-07T11:57:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=76"},"modified":"2008-04-07T10:58:55","modified_gmt":"2008-04-07T09:58:55","slug":"demonstrations-for-pi-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=76","title":{"rendered":"Demonstrations for Pi Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next Friday will be March 14th which is celebrated by some as Pi Day<\/a> 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<\/a> 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<\/a> day<\/a> demonstrations<\/a> turned out to be quite popular<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So the question that remained to be answered was “what demonstration should I write?”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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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).<\/p>\n

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My next thought was to consider some series that would sum up to approximations of Pi. Again – it’s been done.<\/p>\n

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In addition to these three there are many others such as<\/p>\n