Comments for Real Pi Day

Comment on Welcome! by paul

paul — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:16:47 +0000

Thanks...I'm not on Facebook, so I'll happily leave that piece to those who are! I'll be updating the site with information for 2011 by the end of the year. For 2011, we'll be going with the perihelion-to-perihelion calculation. We don't get as precise a time (the USNO tables only specify the Earth's apsides to the hour), but this seems like a fair trade-off. A quick calculation gives us a date of April 30, 2010, at around 9 AM UTC. I'll double-check the calculations before updating the front page.

Comment on Welcome! by Jonathan

Jonathan — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:07:08 +0000

As of today, I couldn’t find a Facebook group or event or anything for this… So I created one at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115869981809695, linking it to this page. I hope you don’t mind.

Also, would we be able to update this page with new values for the 2011 Real Pi Day? Basic calculation gives 6:09 AM UTC on April 17, though again, astrophysicists might be able to give more accurate predictions.

Comment on Improving the Real Pi Day Calculation by daxm

daxm — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:33:04 +0000

It isn’t as fun as (1/pi) but 2*pi is 360 degrees. So the 1/2 point through the year would “truly” be pi day. (Choose whatever starting point you wish but I like your winter solstice idea. What is 1 man’s pi day would be another’s 2*pi day.)

Comment on Welcome! by Daniel Harper

Daniel Harper — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:45:21 +0000

I am glad that someone with the math skills made this connection.When I realized pi day was dependent on the format of the date, I thought it should be be related the orbit of the earth but I could not figure how. I would like to start a Facebook group and link it to realpiday.org, or become a fan if you would rather start one yourself.
Thank you, Daniel Harper

Comment on Improving the Real Pi Day Calculation by jchart

jchart — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:15:31 +0000

I suggest we turn our efforts to something more practical … such as constructing a pi:1 Martini to celebrate the day.

Comment on Improving the Real Pi Day Calculation by Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:09:45 +0000

One difficulty that I have with the whole proposal is that no matter how we calculate this, even down to the millisecond, we are not getting “real” pi unless we want to say that real pi occurs sometime between time A and time B. After all, any time we give will still be a rational number of time units, which pi transcends.

Comment on Another Possibility: Calculate from Perihelion by Tom

Tom — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:07:04 +0000

Actually, the appropriate point is the first point of aries, (i.e. the vernal equinox) as that is the 0,0 point in the celestial coordinate system.

Comment on Another Possibility: Calculate from Perihelion by Dave Lawson

Dave Lawson — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:44:38 +0000

To an amateur astronomer, this sounds like the most reasonable choice. Many of the great observatories are based in the Southern Hemisphere, and so to discriminate against those fine contributors to our body of knowledge is thoughtless.

There are many ways to calculate such an event, but because of the basis in science of this particular one, lets be as objective as possible.
Dave Lawson

Comment on Improving the Real Pi Day Calculation by jon

jon — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:42:05 +0000

It seems more practical to find something interesting about the day that is 365.25/6.28 days prior to March 14 and calling that the starting point.

Comment on Improving the Real Pi Day Calculation by Gareth

Gareth — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:43:50 +0000

An imaginary line connecting the sun and a planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times as the planet moves through its orbit. A consequence of this is that a planet moves fastest when closest to the Sun. Newton will have something to say about this.

So from this we only need to calculate 1/pi the number of days in the year from perihelion or winter solstice.