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Post by auntym on Mar 13, 2015 14:09:05 GMT -6
www.space.com/28824-pi-day-century-nasa-challenge.html?cmpid=514648 Celebrate Pi Day of the Century with NASA Math Challengeby Shannon Hall, Staff Writer March 13, 2015 This graphic celebrating Pi Day shows NASA missions utilizing the mathematical constant pi (L to R): Mars rover Opportunity, Dawn spacecraft orbiting Ceres, Jupiter's moon Europa and Voyager spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Who said math couldn't be fun? In honor of the Pi Day of the century, 3.1415 (March 4, 2015), NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has created a dizzying math challenge. Hint: every solution will use the mathematical constant pi: the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. The NASA Pi Day challenge www.livescience.com/29197-what-is-pi.html includes four real-world problems that ask you to identify how many times Opportunity's wheels might rotate, the number of photographs the Dawn spacecraft will snap of the entire dwarf planet Ceres, the potential volumes of Europa's ocean, and the fraction of radio beams that will reach Earth from our most distant spacecraft. "On Pi Day, I will think about the nature of a day, as Earth's rotation on its axis carries me on a circle 21,000 miles (34,000 kilometers) in circumference, which I calculated using pi and my latitude," said Marc Rayman, NASA's chief engineer and mission director for the Dawn mission to Ceres, said in a statement. www.nasa.gov/jpl/on-pi-day-how-scientists-use-this-number/index.html#.VQNGQI4srpdScientists and engineers work on similar problems every day. And pi tends to always be involved, whether they're calculating the surface of a sphere or the effect of space-time with Einstein's equation for general relativity. You can share your answers by tweeting to @nasajpl_Edu with the hashtag #PiDay. NASA will release the answers in a companion graphic on March 16. NASA's Pi Day match problems are aimed at students between grades 4 and 11, but anyone can try to solve them. To take a stab at solving NASA's Pi Day challenges visit: www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/piday2015CONTINUE READING: www.space.com/28824-pi-day-century-nasa-challenge.html?cmpid=514648
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Pi DAY
Mar 14, 2015 13:55:29 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 14, 2015 13:55:29 GMT -6
hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_PI_DAY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULTMar 14, 3:22 AM EDT Going full circle for math and pastries on a special Pi DayBy SETH BORENSTEIN / AP Science Writer AP Photo/Chitose Suzuki WASHINGTON (AP) -- Saturday is the day when love of math and a hankering for pastry come full circle. Saturday is Pi Day, a once-in-a-year calendar date that this time squares the fun with a once-in-a-century twist. Saturday is 3-14-15, the first five digits of the mathematical constant pi: 3.141592653. The best times to celebrate are at 9:26 and 53 seconds, morning and evening. The next time that happens is in March 2115."It's a portal into this magical mysterious world of mathematics," said University of California Berkeley mathematician and author Edward Frenkel. "Pi is special." Pi is the constant used to calculate the area of a circle, as in pi times the radius squared, but it appears all over other parts of mathematics. It "is kind of a basic atomic building block" for math, said Temple University mathematician and author John Paulos, who was interviewed at precisely 3:14:15 p.m. In some places, Pi Day is celebrated with the edible type of pie. "It's a real exciting moment for math enthusiasm," said Nathan Kaplan, a Yale University math professor, who called it a time for people to "remember how much fun they found some of the stuff in school." Kaplan acknowledged that most people don't really recall math as fun, blaming that on how it's taught: "There's fun stuff out there in the quantitative world." CONTINUE READING: hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_PI_DAY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
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Pi DAY
Mar 14, 2015 20:28:32 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 14, 2015 20:28:32 GMT -6
www.aol.com/article/2015/03/14/nerd-alert-its-super-pi-day/21153316/?icid=maing-grid7|maing11|dl8|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D627763Nerd alert! It's Super Pi DayMar 14th 2015 Nerds and general math lovers of America are celebrating a special holiday this Saturday. No, not Albert Einstein's birthday, although that is also Saturday. This will be the first perfect Pi Day in a century. Saturday's date perfectly lists the first five digits of the infinite mathematical constant, pi - 3.1415. So why is pi so special? The number represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. "Pi has held an almost mystical quality to humans throughout time," Smithsonian Magazine explains. "Its unspoken presence can be felt in the circular ruins of Stonehenge, in the vaulted ceilings of domed Roman temples and in the celestial spheres of Plato and Ptolemy." Scientists everywhere are getting pumped for the special day. Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted: "Crazy Pi-Day nears. But only if you write the month first, the day second, and a two-decimal truncated year third. 03/14/15." And MIT will follow its tradition of announcing who got in on Pi Day, so the next generation of leaders in science, technology, engineering and math will find out Saturday if they got in to arguably the best engineering school in the country. Plus, there are tons of celebrations across the country. WATCH VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.aol.com/article/2015/03/14/nerd-alert-its-super-pi-day/21153316/?icid=maing-grid7|maing11|dl8|sec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D627763 Pi Day of the Century: Celebrating an Irrational Number news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/03/150313-pi-day-century-celebration-math-culture-science/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20150314news-piday&utm_campaign=Content&sf7999545=1
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Pi DAY
Mar 16, 2015 11:53:00 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 16, 2015 11:53:00 GMT -6
OSIRIS-REx @osirisrex Happy #PiDay! Here's how scientists use Pi on asteroids like Bennu
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Pi DAY
Mar 14, 2018 14:17:51 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 14, 2018 14:17:51 GMT -6
www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/column/teachable-moments/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASA&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=49252204Teachable Moments | March 9, 2018 Pi Goes the Distance at NASABy Lyle Tavernier / Pi Day, the annual celebration of one of mathematics’ most popular numbers, is back! Representing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, pi has many practical applications, including the development and operation of space missions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The March 14 holiday is celebrated around the world by math enthusiasts and casual fans alike – from memorizing digits of pi (the current Pi World Ranking record is 70,030 digits) to baking and eating pies. JPL is inviting people to participate in its 2018 NASA Pi Day Challenge – four illustrated math puzzlers involving pi and real problems scientists and engineers solve to explore space, also available as a free poster! Answers will be released on March 15. Why March 14?Pi is what’s known as an irrational number, meaning its decimal representation never ends and it never repeats. It has been calculated to more than one trillion digits, but NASA scientists and engineers actually use far fewer digits in their calculations (see “How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need?”). The approximation 3.14 is often precise enough, hence the celebration occurring on March 14, or 3/14 (when written in U.S. month/day format). The first known celebration occurred in 1988, and in 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution designating March 14 as Pi Day and encouraging teachers and students to celebrate the day with activities that teach students about pi. Explore the entire NASA Pi Day Challenge lesson collection, including free posters and handouts! TAKE THE Pi IN THE SKY CHALLENGE: www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/nasapidaychallengeRocket Science You Can Do With Pi
You may already know all about the mathematical constant pi (π) and how it can be used to calculate things like the circumference of a circle or the volume of a sphere. But did you know pi is also used all the time by NASA scientists and engineers to explore other planets?
In this challenge, you can solve some of the same problems NASA scientists and engineeers do using pi! To show students how pi is used at NASA and give them a chance to do the very same math, the JPL Education Office has once again put together a Pi Day challenge featuring real-world math problems used for space exploration. This year’s challenge includes exploring the interior of Mars, finding missing helium in the clouds of Jupiter, searching for Earth-size exoplanets and uncovering the mysteries of an asteroid from outside our solar system. Here’s some of the science behind this year’s challenge:Scheduled to launch May 5, 2018, the InSight Mars lander will be equipped with several scientific instruments, including a heat flow probe and a seismometer. Together, these instruments will help scientists understand the interior structure of the Red Planet. It’s the first time we’ll get an in-depth look at what’s happening inside Mars. On Earth, seismometers are used to measure the strength and location of earthquakes. Similarly, the seismometer on Insight will allow us to measure marsquakes! The way seismic waves travel through the interior of Mars can tell us a lot about what lies beneath the surface. This year’s Quake Quandary problem challenges students to determine the distance from InSight to a hypothetical marsquake using pi! CONTINUE READING: www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/column/teachable-moments/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASA&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=49252204
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Pi DAY
Mar 14, 2018 14:53:40 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 14, 2018 14:53:40 GMT -6
blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pi-in-the-sky/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=&utm_term=math_blog_text_resurface Pi in the Sky
Elegant new visualization maps the digits of pi as a star catalogue By Amanda Montañez / www.scientificamerican.com/author/amanda-montanez/ March 14, 2017 Credit: Martin Krzywinski The mind of Martin Krzywinski is a rich and dizzying place, teeming with fascinating questions, ideas, and inspiration. Krzywinski is a scientist and data visualizer whose primary line of work involves genome analysis for cancer research. In his spare time, though, he explores his many different interests as a scientific and visual thinker through creative projects. For the past few years, one such project has occupied him on a recurring basis each March: reimagining the digits of pi in a novel, science-based, and visually compelling way. Today, this delightful March 14th ("Pi Day") tradition brings us the digits of pi mapped onto the night sky, as a star catalogue. Like the infinitely long sequence of pi, space has no discernible end, but we earthbound observers can only see so far. So Krzywinski places a cap at 12 million digits and groups each successive series of 12 numerals to define a latitude, longitude and brightness, resulting in a field of a million stars, randomly arranged. Just as humans throughout history have found figures and narratives among the stars, this new array of celestial bodies also yields a story. As a way to honor our evolutionary ancestors, Krzywinski connects the dots to create shapes of extinct animals from around the globe. Carée projection of “Pi in the Sky” star chart Credit: Martin Krzywinski But he couldn’t possibly stop there, so Krzywinski takes the visualization a step further, experimenting with different projections to re-create the map in various spatial iterations. Azimuthal projections of “Pi in the Sky” star chart Credit: Martin Krzywinski Hammer/Aitoff projection of “Pi in the Sky” star chart Credit: Martin Krzywinski To read more about the visualization, including descriptions of the animals depicted, and a poem written by the artist’s collaborator Paolo Marcazzan, visit Martin Krzywinski’s website. There, you can also explore his previous Pi Day visualizations and even purchase them as posters. blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pi-in-the-sky/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=&
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Pi DAY
Mar 14, 2019 10:06:29 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 14, 2019 10:06:29 GMT -6
HAPPY PI DAY
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Pi DAY
Mar 14, 2019 10:23:08 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Mar 14, 2019 10:23:08 GMT -6
www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/3/8/nasa-rocket-science-its-easy-as-pi/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASA&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=64791002 NASA Verified account @nasa
The excitement of #PiDay is upon us! This year’s #NASAPiDayChallenge features four planetary puzzlers that show how pi is used for our missions — such as sizing up a storm on Jupiter & blasting ice samples with lasers! Take on the challenge: go.nasa.gov/2JfP8hl Teachable Moments| March 8, 2019
NASA Rocket Science? It's Easy As PiBy Lyle Tavernier / www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/author/lyle-tavernier/› The 2019 NASA Pi Day Challenge
In the NewsThe excitement of Pi Day – and our annual excuse to chow down on pie – is upon us! The holiday celebrating the mathematical constant pi arrives on March 14, and with it comes the sixth installment of the NASA Pi Day Challenge from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Education Office. This challenge gives students in grades 6-12 a chance to solve four real-world problems faced by NASA scientists and engineers. (Even if you’re done with school, they’re worth a try for the bragging rights.) Visit the "Pi in the Sky 6" lesson page to explore classroom resources and downloads for the 2019 NASA Pi Day Challenge. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kim Orr | + Expand image www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/pi-in-the-sky-6/ Why March 14?Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is what is known as an irrational number. As an irrational number, its decimal representation never ends, and it never repeats. Though it has been calculated to trillions of digits, we use far fewer at NASA. In fact, 3.14 is a good approximation, which is why March 14 (or 3/14 in U.S. month/day format) came to be the date that we celebrate this mathematical marvel. The first-known Pi Day celebration occurred in 1988. In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution designating March 14 as Pi Day and encouraging teachers and students to celebrate the day with activities that teach students about pi. The 2019 Challenge This year’s NASA Pi Day Challenge features four planetary puzzlers that show students how pi is used at the agency. The challenges involve weathering a Mars dust storm, sizing up a shrinking storm on Jupiter, estimating the water content of a rain cloud on Earth and blasting ice samples with lasers! In late spring of 2018, a dust storm began stretching across Mars and eventually nearly blanketed the entire planet in thick dust. Darkness fell across Mars’ surface, blocking the vital sunlight that the solar-powered Opportunity rover needed to survive. It was the beginning of the end for the rover’s 15-year mission on Mars. At its height, the storm covered all but the peak of Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system. In the Deadly Dust challenge, students must use pi to calculate what percentage of the Red Planet was covered by the dust storm. The Terra satellite, orbiting Earth since 1999, uses the nine cameras on its Multi-Angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer, or MISR, instrument to provide scientists with unique views of Earth, returning data about atmospheric particles, land-surface features and clouds. Estimating the amount of water in a cloud, and the potential for rainfall, is serious business. Knowing how much rain may fall in a given area can help residents and first responders prepare for emergencies like flooding and mudslides. In Cloud Computing, students can use their knowledge of pi and geometric shapes to estimate the amount of water contained in a cloud. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a giant storm that has been fascinating observers since the early 19th century, is shrinking. The storm has been continuously observed since the 1830s, but measurements from spacecraft like Voyager, the Hubble Space Telescope and Juno indicate the storm is getting smaller. How much smaller? In Storm Spotter, students can determine the answer to that very question faced by scientists. Scientists studying ices found in space, such as comets, want to understand what they’re made of and how they interact and react with the environment around them. To see what molecules may form in space when a comet comes into contact with solar wind or sunlight, scientists place an ice sample in a vacuum and then expose it to electrons or ultraviolet photons. Scientists have analyzed samples in the lab and detected molecules that were later observed in space on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. To analyze the lab samples, an infrared laser is aimed at the ice, causing it to explode. But the ice will explode only if the laser is powerful enough. Scientist use pi to figure out how strong the laser needs to be to explode the sample – and students can do the same when they solve the Icy Intel challenge. www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2019/3/8/nasa-rocket-science-its-easy-as-pi/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=NASA&utm_campaign=NASASocial&linkId=64791002
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