Pi Goes to Washington
U.S. House Resolution 224 (March 2009)
» Congress votes, not quite unanimously, to recognize March 14 as Pi Day
Only 112 years after its last appearance on a legislative floor—the doomed bill in the In ..Read More..
Devoted Beyond Death
Ludolph van Ceulen ((1540-1610)
» Tireless hand calculator who took pi to 35 digits & had them engraved on his tombstone.
He spent a lifetime number-crunching, and all he wanted was to carve it into stone. Ludolph van Ceulen was a German mathematician in the late 1500s who moved to the Netherlands to escape oppression. He had two passions: math an ..Read More..
The Guy Who Named it Pi
William Jones ((1675-1749)
» First Mathematician to use the Greek letter π to represent the important ratio.
While talk of the ratio has been around for about 4,000 years, and the number itself probably a bit longer, the symbol π is just reaching the big 3-0-0. A fellow from the Welsh island of Anglesey, who grew up to be a rather well-connected but unmemorabl ..Read More..