BLApril17.ToWeb

The Column
By Chuck Van Riper
American Pi
M
arch 14th (as I write this) is a special day. It is Albert
Einstein’s birthday. It is also “Pi Day” (3/14).
As many of you know, pi describes the ratio of the circumference
of a circle to its diameter. The value of pi has
been pondered for the past 4000 years. Around 2000 B.C.,
the Babylonians computed pi to be 3.125 and it was the
Egyptians who came up with the current standard value
of 3.143. The numbers after the decimal go on forever
without repeating. It is considered to be the most important
number in mathematics. The first 144 digits of pi add up
to 666. Hmmmm…what a totally useless factoid that is!
In 2002, a Japanese scientist used a powerful computer to
compute pi to over a trillion digits! How did they know
that? Did they count all the digits? That might take a while.
There are no instances of the sequence 123456 in the first
million digits of pi. If the circumference of the Earth were
calculated using pi rounded to the ninth decimal, an error
of less than a quarter of an inch would occur. If you take
the circumference of a pumpkin and divide it by its diameter,
what do you get? Pumpkin pi! Yea, I know it’s an old
one.
Albert Einstein was born on pi day. He would be 135
this year. Although he was mostly known for his E=MC2
equation, which describes mass and energy, that is not what
he won the Nobel Prize for. His Nobel Prize was actually
given to him for his work in light and electricity. His paper
on “the photoelectric effect” described how light could be
used to create electricity if treated as a particle rather than
a wave as it was commonly thought. Both theories were
presented in 1905. His work with the photoelectric effect is
the technology behind solar panels. It wasn’t until almost
50 years later, in 1954, that a photocell was created with
enough energy to create electricity. Amazing! Einstein
was such a visionary.
As a child, Einstein was considered “slow” because
he didn’t start really speaking until late in his childhood
(some say he was 7 before he put sentences together). He
didn’t like school. He loved music. He was an accomplished
violinist. He loved Mozart. He is often quoted as
saying that had he not gone into science, he would be a
musician. In 1902, he had a daughter. No one knows what
happened to her. He was passionate about social issues.
He supported the civil rights movement. He considered
racism to be the worst disease in the country.
22 - Brevard Live April 2017