I smell a conspiracy.\u00a0 I’m not talking about the recent mysterious disappearance of a Malaysian airliner.\u00a0 The conspiracy I have discovered is something far more insidious.\u00a0 It’s an attack on the very fabric of geekdom.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m talking about the defamation of \u03c0.<\/p>\n
As most of you realize, we are just a couple of days past one of the most sacrosanct days on the calendar, March 14, aka 3\/14, aka \u03c0 (or Pi) Day, so designated because the 3\/14 representation of the date is suggestive of 3.14, the popularly abbreviated form of the unending decimal value of \u03c0, one of mathematics’ most sacred constants.<\/p>\n
While this year’s \u03c0 date, 3\/14\/14, has a nice ring to it, \u03c0 aficionados will realize that next year, or the year after, are more significant, depeding on whether you truncate (3.1415) or round up (3.1416).\u00a0 But today, just 2 days past this year’s blowout celebration, I stumbled across a Gizmodo article<\/a>, complete with cute video, suggesting that the whole concept of celebrating the awesomeness of \u03c0 is overrated.\u00a0 Not just overrated, but “just dumb”.<\/p>\n This bit of heresy was presented by self-described “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart.\u00a0 Her arguments, presented at a pace that allowed no time to absorb them and cogitate on their validity, caused me to ponder.\u00a0 Since stalking hot mathemusicians seems like a reasonable hobby for a geek, and maybe a healthy diversification from my previous obsession of stalking hot event riders, I searched for more information about the mysterious Ms. Hart who boldly professed such blasphemy.<\/p>\n Not surprisingly, she has a blog, vihart.com<\/a>, which demonstrates her ability to write amusingly and eloquently about a number of topics of varying degrees of geekiness.\u00a0 Somehow it all seemed so nice and not what I would have expected from such a heretic.\u00a0 Maybe she really has a point.<\/p>\n