Happy Pi Day! Weird facts about Pi you probably didn’t know

Happy Pi Day!

Not every mathematical equation gets its own special day. But Pi — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, represented as the Greek letter π — is very special.

Each year on March 14 (3/14) mathematical nerds everywhere celebrate Pi Day. The idea of celebrating Pi was organized by Larry Shaw at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988. It even has governmental backing: on March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution recognizing March 14 as National Pi Day.

WATCH: Global News attempts to memorize Pi

But what’s the big deal about Pi?

Understanding Pi is essential if you want to make calculations for circles, cylinders, spheres, and anything circular, even an ellipse. So it’s particularly useful in building anything where circular objects are used.

Here are some nifty things about Pi you probably didn’t know:

• Pi was calculated by the ancient Babylonians about 4,000 years ago. They figured the area of a circle by taking three times the square of its radius.
• Throughout history the value of Pi changed. It underwent several incarnations such as 3.12, 3.16.
• Pi Day happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.
• The world record for memorizing Pi belongs to Rajveer Meena of India who correctly recited it to 70,000 decimal places on March 21, 2015. It took nearly 10 hours for him to recite.
• The world record for a computer calculating Pi was to 13.3 trillion decimal places.
• 3.14 backwards looks like PIE.
• There are no occurrences of 123456 in the first million digits of Pi.
• The first six digits of Pi (314159) appear in that order at least six times in the first 10 million decimal places.
• π was adopted as the symbol for Pi in the 1700s.

Now, go out and celebrate Pi Day with some pie of your own.