Friday, March 22, 2013

Pi Day at Caltech

In the latest manifestation of self-proclaimed Caltech nerd-dom, a group of undergrads strung a chain of 15,000 colored paper loops across the campus in honor of Pi day. There are nine colors, each one representing a number. The multicolor chain should be in order, representing the digits of Pi going 15,000 digits deep.

For the uninitiated, Pi is the digit that’s mostly often simplified to 3.14 (hence, March 14) and is used to calculate the circumference of a circle. The decimal can go out forever and mathematicians have figured it out to the 10 trillionth number so far.

From 2013 03 14 Pasadena

More photos after the jump.



From 2013 03 14 Pasadena

From 2013 03 14 Pasadena

All the photos from Pi Day at Caltech can be viewed on Google Photos.

1 comment:

Mark Steger said...

Close-eyed readers will have noticed a mistake in the LA Times article above. I'll give you a minute to go back if you didn't spot it the first time you read it. Spoiler: if the students used only 9 colors of paper, they couldn't represent all 10 digits, 0-9, that appear in pi. Bonus question: how many digits of pi could they represent with their colored-paper link chain before needing that tenth color?