Hey Ray! It's Pi Day!
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- What is pie? Well, it is a baked good made with fruit or meat and vegetables with a pastry bottom, and usually a pastry top.
Pie made by a grandma tastes better, too.
That is just my opinion, though.
That is not the Pi we are celebrating, though.
We are celebrating the Pi, which is the relationship between the middle, or diameter of a circle and its circumference -- the distance on the outside.
The beautiful thing about Pi is that is usually stated as 3.14…that is why we celebrate Pi day on March 14th, or 3-14
Pi is pretty simple, and we can use pie to show how it works.
Take the distance across the middle of the pie (the diameter), then multiply by Pi, or 3.14, and you get the measurement for the perimeter of the pie.
This is a great tool to make sure you are getting your proper slice size.
One cool thing about Pi is that it is an infinite number.
We usually stop at 3.14, but Pi is a number that goes on forever.
It is called an infinite decimal.
Since it never stops, I thought we would try to find some cool number combinations in Pi's first 10-thousand digits.
You can't spell Pittsburgh without "Pi", right?
So, how about this? The number combination 412, which is Pittsburgh's area code, shows up 9 times?
What is so cool about the number 9? That is Bill Mazeroski's number -- he's the Pittsburgh Pirate who hit a walk-off home run in Game 7 of the 1960 world series to allow the Pirates to defeat the Yankees!
How Pittsburghy is that?
With an infinite number, though, you should expect a Pittsburgh connection.
How about the number 2 -- That is KDKA's channel.
It shows up 1021 times in Pi's first 10-thousand digits. That is a lot of repeat performances.
Your parents might know the number 8-6-7-5-3-0-9. That number comes up exactly zero times! I just wanted to get a song stuck in your parent's heads!
1758, the year Pittsburgh was founded. That number combination shows up once.
So what is significant about the number 1? That is how many whole pies I plan to eat today!
I am an adult, and I can have pie for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I want!
Happy Pi Day!