Australian Pi day July 22

Americans and Canadians "celebrate" Pi day in March, but in Australia they celebrate it on July 22. Pi Day is celebrated in Australia on the 22nd day of the 7th month because the number pi is often approximated as the fraction 22/7.Besides making and eating Pi(e)s, this site has a suggestion on how to celebrate Pi day with an interesting activity, making a Pi necklace.

Pi is an amazing number, it goes on forever! Pi is an irrational number, one that cannot be defined as a fraction. Pi is approximately equal to 3.14159 but has an infinite number of decimal places; the latest calculations are to an amazing 1.24 trillion digits!

What's more, the digits that make up pi don't seem to follow any pattern at all, but if you count up how many of each digit is represented in the first 100 decimal places, you find they all occur around the same number of times – between 8 and 13.

Try this cryptography puzzle:

Cryptography, the science of creating and reading secret codes, is one interesting application of pi. Because pi is a number which has random digit patterns, using a section of pi as an ‘encryption key' is a good way to encode information. You can try it yourself:

assign each alphabet letter a number, 1-26, so that a=1, b=2 and so on
decide on your key from the digits of pi (pi= 3.141592653589793238). Our key will be 3238 (the last 4 digits listed)
write your message in the numbers given in step 1, "Hello" would equal to "8 5 12 12 15"
use your key to change the digits, our code will be x multiplied by 3238, so the code is now "25904 16190 38856 38856 48570"
the person who receives your message will need to divide each digit by the key, 3238, to get back to the original number code, and then the letter. If they don't know the key, they will have no idea what it means!

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Australian Pi day July 22

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