Pi Day passes yet again

To most of us, Sunday probably seemed fairly ordinary, but to anyone with more than a passing penchant for numbers, it national Pi day. Whilst you'd be forgiven for thinking all about pastry and fillings, Pi day actually celebrates one of the most widely known and quirkiest mathematical constants known to humanity.

Essentially mathematical short-hand for value of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (which is approximately 3.14159), Pi is commonly referred to by the Greek letter Π.

With Sunday having been the 14th day of the third month, Pi day was officially celebrated at 1.59pm (it's a number geek thing). To help you prepare for next years Pi day celebrations, here's a bunch of handy Pi facts:

* Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day (3/14/1879)

* Π is the most widely recognised piece of mathematical short hand in the world.

* Scholars call Π the most important and intriguing number in all of mathematics.

* The symbol for pi (Π) has been only used for the past 250 years.

* You can never truly measure the circumference or the area of a circle because you can never really know the full value of pi. Pi is an irrational number, meaning it goes on forever in a seemingly random sequence.

* Both Π and the letter p are the sixteenth letters in the Greek and English alphabets.

* Egyptologists have been fascinated for centuries by the fact that the Great Pyramid at Gaza approximates pi with the vertical height of the pyramid having the same relationship its the perimeter as the radius of a circle to its circumference.

* Spookily, the first 144 digits of pi add up to 666 (which aside from being an Iron Maiden song is also attributed by many scholars as "the number of the Beast").

* In 1995, Hiroyoki Gotu memorized 42,195 places of pi and is considered the current pi champion.

* It took a Hitachi supercomputer over 400 hours to compute pi to 1.24 trillion digits

* Since there are 360 degrees in a circle and pi is intimately connected with the circle, some mathematicians were delighted to discover that the number 360 is at the 359th digit position of pi.

* Babylonians established the constant circle ratio as 3-1/8 or 3.125. The ancient Egyptians arrived at a slightly different value of 3-1/7 or 3.143.a

* One of the earliest known records of pi was written by an Egyptian scribe named Ahmes (c. 1650 B.C.) on what is now known as the Rhind Papyrus. He was off by less than 1 per cent of the modern approximation of pi (3.141592).l

* Archimedes was so engrossed in calculating Pi that he did not notice Roman soldiers had successfully invaded. When a Roman soldier approached him, he yelled in Greek "Do not touch my circles!" The Roman soldier cut off his head and went on his business.

* A refined value of pi was obtained by the Chinese mathematicians much earlier than their western counterparts. The Chinese used decimal notations and had a symbol for zero. European mathematicians would not use a symbol for zero until the late Middle Ages.

* The first six digits of pi (314159) appear in order at least six times among the first 10 million decimal places of Pi.