Antonoff: It may be Pi Day, but what does the hypotenuse say?
The National Museum of Mathematics has already run out of red pizza Pi cutters, though you can still get one in black. The handle is in the shape of the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, π (pronounced pi), making it the perfect tool for divvying up a dish of saucy dough while contemplating the ratio between its circumference and diameter.
Call it a date of reckoning or, more precisely, the second of the century. On Saturday 3.14.15 at exactly 9:26:53 in the morning (with a repeat performance 12 hours later) mathematicians will marvel at how all the digits line up. Measure the circumference of any circle, divide it by its diameter, and you'll get 3.141592653!
If you carry out the division, the result goes on insufferably. Then again, there are just so many digits you can fit on a Pi Day T-shirt. The Museum of Mathematics Gift Shop has those in stock too.
I haven't been this excited about numerical coincidences since the time on the treadmill when I observed that at 18 minutes, 18 seconds if you added the four digits across the readout, they totaled 18! I nearly flew off the machine.
This Saturday, Pi Day will be celebrated in math clubs and pizza parlors across the land. But all the hoopla makes me stop and think about the other thing etched into memory from Mrs. Kachulis's 10th-grade geometry class: the Pythagorean theorem.
You know it by heart: a2 + b2 = c2. When you square each of the two legs of a right-angled triangle and add them together, the result equals the square of the diagonal, also known as the hypotenuse.
The promotion of Pi Day makes me wonder if the Pythagorean theorem is being swept into the closet below the stairs.
I'm no mathematician, so I asked a few: Does the Pythagorean theorem deserve a degree of respect equal to or greater than that being heaped upon Pi?
"Yes," says Robert Kaplan, co-founder and co-director of The Math Circle at Harvard University.
"No," says Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University and the NPR Math Guy.
Mind you, Kaplan's enthusiasm for the Pythagorean theorem doesn't extend to Pythagoras himself. He says the theorem was actually postulated 1,500 years earlier in an area of the world now known as Iraq — not Greece. (I can already hear Athena Kachulis sharpening her isosceles triangle.)
Still, if it wasn't for the Pythagorean theorem, says Kaplan, "We wouldn't have put men on the moon or built that bridge and this skyscraper. It underlies all our measuring and building."
"No," counters Devlin. "To mathematicians, Pi is a powerful superhero that turns up all the time in a huge range of mathematical problems, but the Pythagorean theorem is a one-trick wonder that can only shine in the elementary geometry class. Pi deserves its special day. The Pythagorean theorem, for all that it has beauty we can admire, does not."
SCORE: Pi, 1; Pythagorean theorem, 1. This calls for a comparative chart.