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That’s Right Mathletes, It’s Ultimate Pi Day!

The 14th of March has rolled around once again and if you’re anything like us, you’ve barely been able to contain your excitement for the chance to tell absolutely everyone foolish enough to make eye contact with you about how today’s date is similar to everyone’s favorite irrational number. Well hold onto your T9s because today is actually more Pi than you may realize.

To the keen eyes of a LOT of people and as foreseen by the all-knowing and all-powerful George Takei, today’s date as expressed in the U.S. is a whole bunch of digits of Pi.

March-Pi-Day-031415

As Sulu himself pointed out on March 3rd, this is only for the U.S. as not everyone in the world expresses their date format in such a way. Not to worry though, we’re already hard at work planning on an article for 3:14 pm on September 15th 2653 for Nerdist.uk which we figure will exist by then. In order to distract you from whether or not that last joke holds any water, here’s the wonderful Danica McKellar to tell you all you need to know about Pi.

Dates today’s Ultimate Pi Day will really only happen once in a lifetime (twice if you don’t use military time) patterns in dates tend to happen a lot, or at least enough for there to be websites devoted to them like this one here that lists palindrome dates like the next one we’ll see; May 10, 2015 (5102015). There is a tool to find date patterns and also have a calculator that allows you to find just how many seconds you’ve been alive which I, having just used, don’t entirely recommend for now realizing you don’t ever feel as bad as when you realize you turned a billion seconds old sometime back in January and nobody noticed. Anyways, back to the numbers.

While the folks out there who believe in numerology will say things like “You know, the world skipped the years 666 & 999” or “The Number 23 was the best Jim Carrey movie” they are mistaken in both instances because those two years did actually occur like all the others and the undeniably best Jim Carrey film was Earth Girls are Easy. That being said, it still is pretty astonishing the way people give credence to reading into numbers.

The home Ronald and Nancy Reagan retired in underwent an address change at the owner’s request from 666 to 668 St. Cloud Rd. in Bel Air, California. This was most likely religiously motivated but still shows the power people can give to numbers. (We don’t recommend Googling the words “Ronald Reagan Numerology 666”. The resulting banner ads are…intense.) More recently, while not exactly numerology, Jaden Smith has peppered interviews with his interest in mathematics and patterns saying things like “I think that there is that special equation for everything, but I don’t think our mathematics have evolved enough for us to even—I think there’s, like, a whole new mathematics that we’d have to learn to get that equation.” Is it our place to say if something like that is wrong? Boy, we’d sure like it to be. Yet, if people find solace in such things while not hurting anyone, so be it. Frankly, in researching examples of celebrity numerology it isn’t even the weirdest habit we stumbled upon. We’re looking at you, Heidi Klum – traveling the world with your tiny pouch filled with your own baby teeth.

But at the end of the day, we here at Nerdist really just love the fun we can have with numbers and really look forward to the memes, status updates and hopefully the sharing of a certain Pi themed video we made.

How are you celebrating Pi Day? Do you have a favorite date pattern? What are some of your favorite Pi memes, comics or jokes? Let us know in the comments and or share your favorite math puns with me on twitter @TheBlakeRodgers

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