Tag Archives: math

That’s my (youngest) boy!

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Jeff is a biostatistician on the faculty at Columbia. I try to understand what he does, and sometimes I sort of get it, but I can’t exactly explain it.

He goes to conferences to present papers often. I’ve never seen him speak until now. He gave a talk in Banff at the Frontiers in Functional Data Analysis Conference a few days ago and it was recorded. He said I could share the link with you!

Click here to watch Jeff’s talk. I find it interesting that it is the norm for a speaker to speak fast at these things—they have a time limit and a lot to fit in. I’m proud of the fact that Jeff is clear, even when he’s talking fast. I don’t think I could do it.

Here Jeff is, younger. It’s fun to show him in front of a quilt-in-progress on my design wall. I’m lucky that my boys (and my DIL) all love my quilts. And it’s interesting to me that they like different quilts so everyone get to be happy.

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FYI: That quilt went to American Patchwork & Quilting. They patterned it, and they own the quilt.

National pi day!

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When did you last think of pi? Not this kind of pie…

Pies

Pi Day is coming on Saturday, March 14.It is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) every year, around the world. Who knew?

Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. (Remember pi-r-square?)

This year, Pi Day is an “Epic Pi Day”. On Saturday morning, 3.14.15 at 9:26:53 AM, the date/time corresponds to the first 10 digits of pi (π = 3.141592653). This happens only once per century – truly a “once-in-a-lifetime event” for most people. I’ve set my phone alarm so that I can see it happen.
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I am away from home, teaching at the Gulf States Quilting Association Seminar in Metairie, LA. Steve will be home with friends celebrating a Pi Day breakfast of pancakes and sausage (both round, in honor of pi), with eggs and champagne. I will think of them fondly when my alarm goes off in class :-).

My friend, Elizabeth, a fellow pi(e) enthusiast, has found a few fun pi facts that she said I could share with you:

  • A circular room in the Palais de la Découverte science museum in Paris is called the pi room. The room has 707 digits of pi inscribed on its wall (though there is an error beginning at the 528th digit, thanks to William Shanks’ erroneous calculations).
  • In an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Spock commands an evil computer to compute pi to the last digit—which it cannot do, of course, because, as Spock explains, “the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution.” I remember this episode!
  • Givenchy’s PI cologne for men is advertised as a scent that “embodies the confidence of genius.”
  • Both MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have cheers that include “3.14159.”

If I was going to be home, I’d make one of these. It’s probably good I’m not home.

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