Pi Day is celebrated internationally on March 14, and is observed by math enthusiasts and schools all over the world. The first Pi Day celebration was held at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, and then consuming fruit pies. Mathematicians, museum directors discuss the relevance of pi, pi recitations, pie-eating contests (you knew it was coming) and other math related activities. What is more, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology often mails its acceptance (and rejection) letters to be delivered to prospective students on Pi Day!
The truly divine notions are those that are simple, yet impossible to grasp in their totality. One such notion that has evoked wonder and captured the imagination of the human mind since time immemorial is the mathematical constant pi – the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter. How is it that a circle, which is so simple in shape, can boast of a proportion that is so complex in nature?
Fascination with pi has even carried over into non-mathematical culture. There are now poems and songs about pi, and greeting cards relating the power of relationships to the ‘infinite number of digits’ in pi. In some parts of the world the observation of Pi Day is even legally mandated.
With digits continuing on infinitely in a seemingly random fashion, pi has caused countless scientists to scratch their heads in vain as they tried to determine what it exactly is. Throughout history, stretching back to as long as we have written records, there has been much effort to determine pi more accurately and to understand its nature. And yet, despite the best efforts by everyone from Archimedes to Sir Isaac Newton, to modern day mathematicians equipped with super-computers, there is still no single formula to figure out the last digit of pi without having to calculate all its preceding ones. Its decimal representation never ends or repeats. Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be written as the ratio of two integers. Pi is also a transcendental number, meaning that there is no polynomial with rational coefficients for which pi is a root. The implication is that virtually any string of numbers you can imagine is somewhere in pi.
Great architectural feats like suspension bridges and underwater tunnels would not be possible without this constant. Pi is used in calculations involving lengths, areas, and volumes of circles, spheres, cylinders, and cones. It also arises frequently in problems dealing with certain periodic phenomena (e.g., motion of pendulums, alternating electric currents). Designing any structure with cylindrical components, even a wheel, requires the application of this constant. So perhaps the wheel wasn’t the first momentous discovery in human history after all! If you’re still not convinced of the power of Pi Day, you must know that March 14 also marks the birthday of the Nobel Prize winning scientist Albert Einstein.
Dwelling on the significance of pi, one cannot help being struck by the relevance of this enigmatic mathematical construct in describing the process of change that Bangladesh itself is going through right now (not because of pi’s affiliation with the Chaos Theory). That the wheels of change are already whirring merrily in this country cannot be disputed. Among the Frontier Five Economies (according to J.P. Morgan) and the Next 11 (according to Goldman Sachs), it is apparent that Bangladesh is a country that is on the verge of stepping into the global limelight, albeit a bit gingerly. And that is understandable. Dealing with change is not easy, especially for a country like ours with deeply entrenched social and cultural values. But perhaps this apprehension is unfounded. The values and beliefs that we deeply cherish can easily be harnessed to bring about a profound change in our mindset, so that we become more forward-looking in our approach, more aware and environmentally conscious in our actions, and more innovative in our pursuit of sustainable progress. The trick would be to strike a balance between being receptive to the opportunities that change offers while retaining our core identity, to embrace the path to ceaseless change while preserving who we essentially are.
Bangladesh is, of course, not entirely new to the game of coming up with radically innovative ideas to deal with change. This is the country where the concept “the poor are bankable,” regarded as irrational everywhere else on the globe (as irrational as pi, maybe), proved to be a huge success – both at home and around the world. We are not a nation that can be neatly boxed into one identity. We are a tremendously diverse nation, simple in our wants, but complex in our emotions, simple in our livelihoods, but complex in our capabilities. Pi is already an integral part of our lives, in many more ways than we imagine it to be.
This article was written in 2010.
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