Happy Birthday Albert Einstein, & Happy Pi Day

Today is Pi Day, in honor of the mathematical constant pi (π), an irrational number that begins 3.14 — like today’s date, March 14th or 3/14.

π is a letter of the Greek alphabet, and it’s the symbol for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. In other words, if a circle has a diameter of 10 inches, we could find out its circumference by multiplying 10 inches by π, and we’d find out that the circle with a 10-inch diameter has a circumference (or perimeter) of approximately 31.4159265. It can only ever be approximate — never exact — because π is an irrational number, meaning that it goes on forever without repeating or having patterns. Using powerful computers, π has been calculated in recent years into trillions of decimal places.

Pi Day began in 1988, started by a physicist named Larry Shaw. Pi Day celebrations around the nation today involve eating dessert pies or pizza pies, throwing cream pies, and listening to lectures on the importance of the irrational number — sometimes all of these things occurring in unison.

There are legions of people worldwide devoted to memorizing π to as far as they can memorize it. And today around the world, there are π recitation contests.

To aid in the memorization of the never-ending, pattern-less number, people have written poetry and stories in a mnemonic called “Pilish,” which is a way of constrained writing “in which the number of letters in each successive word “spells out” the digits of π.” One of the earliest and best-known examples of it was a sentence by English physicist Sir James Jeans, who wrote: “How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!” ‘How’ has three letters, ‘I’ has one, “need” has four — so it forms 3.14, the start of π — and each successive word’s letter count represents the next digit in π.

Then, in 1996, a piphilologist (as these people are called), wrote a 3,834-digit Cadaeic Cadenza, which begins with a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”; every single word adheres to the constraints that render letter counts into accurate successive π digits.

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Today is Albert Einstein’s (books by this author) birthday. He was born in Ulm, Germany (1879), and his pre-kindergarten fascination with a compass needle left an impression on him that lasted a lifetime. He liked math but hated school, dropped out, and taught himself calculus in the meantime. Einstein worked for the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where his job was to evaluate patent applications for electromagnetic devices and determine whether the inventions described would actually work. The job wasn’t particularly demanding, and at night he would come home and pursue scientific investigations and theories.

In 1905, he wrote a paper on the Special Theory of Relativity, which is that if the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same in every frame of reference, then both time and motion are relative to the observer. That same year, he published three more papers, each of which was just as revolutionary as the first, among them the paper that included his most famous equation: E = mc2. E is energy, m is mass, and c stands for the velocity of light.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. He said, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” WA
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...he said: “Why is it that nobody understands me, and everybody likes me?” That’s Albert Einstein (books by this author), born in Ulm, Germany (1879). As a boy, he was slow to begin speaking, which worried his parents, and later, as a student, he was unremarkable. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich with a teaching degree, but despite his obvious intelligence, his grades weren’t very good — he skipped classes he disliked, and refused to work on projects that didn’t interest him. After graduation, he was the only member of his class not offered a teaching job at the institute, and he spent two years trying unsuccessfully to find a permanent teaching position. Finally, he gave up and applied to work as a technical assistant at the Swiss patent office in Bern. He was hired, and he went to work six days a week, eight hours a day. The work was easy for him, and he earned 3,500 Swiss francs a year.

At the patent office, he worked all day at a lectern, reviewing applications of inventions to see if they were worthy of receiving patents. He said: “Working on the final formulation of technological patents was a veritable blessing for me. It enforced many-sided thinking and also provided important stimuli to physical thought.” His boss encouraged him to be skeptical of every application, not to be taken in by the assumptions of the would-be inventors, and Einstein took the work seriously and was a strict reviewer. Because he was so efficient, he was able to get a day’s work done in just a few hours, which left him the rest of the day to pursue his own scientific ideas. He kept all his notes and theories in the second drawer of his desk, which he called his “theoretical physics department.”

Einstein tried to manage his time evenly: eight hours a day at work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for everything else — although in reality, that “everything else” often cut into his sleep. One of the things he did in his free time was meet with a group of friends to discuss physics and philosophy. Before he secured the job at the patent office in June of 1902, Einstein had advertised himself as a physics tutor. A Romanian philosophy student named Maurice Solovine saw his ad in the paper and went to Einstein’s house to sign up. The two men talked for hours, and after a few more sessions, Einstein decided they should abandon the idea of a tutor-student relationship and just get together to talk as peers. Soon they expanded the group to include others, and named themselves the Olympia Academy. They gathered at Einstein’s apartment, where they ate sausages, cheese, and fruit, and debated the ideas of great thinkers.

All of these ideas about philosophy and theoretical physics were in Einstein’s head as he sat in the patent office conducting what he called his gedankenexperimenten, or thought experiments. He also considered the patents he was reviewing, many of them about electric light, power, the mechanisms of clocks, and electromagnetism. Einstein called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”

In the year 1905, while he worked as a patent clerk, Einstein published four papers that changed the field of physics. These papers were about his particle theory of light; determining the size of molecules suspended in liquid, and how to determine their motion; and special relativity, including his famous equation relating energy and matter: E=mc².

He said, “All of science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.” WA