Countries of the world, categorized by the date format they use. You may be wondering what the hell this has to do with Pi Day - read on to find out. Image: Wikipedia It's time to get excited, because today is a holiday you didn't know you needed: Pi Day! Also known as π day, or #PiDay, as this relatively obscure holiday has suddenly become a massive trending topic on Twitter and other social media. What is Pi Day? As a glowing article at Time Magazine explains: March 14 (3/14) is celebrated annually as Pi Day because the date resembles the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — 3.14159265359 or 3.14 for short. ' If that explanation sounds horrendously nerdy, that's because it is. While Pi Day may be a day for the pocket protector prone among us to rejoice, others of us made sure to erase terms like "circumference" and "diameter" from our memory the minute we got out of geometry class back in 9th grade. For the less nerdy among us looking to make sense of the definition of Pi, think of it this way. Imagine you just ordered a 12 inch (one foot) pizza. Why is it called a 12 inch pizza? Because that's the distance of a straight line from one side of the pizza to the other - the length of the cut you'd have to make to cut the pizza in half. But the distance around that pizza is longer than one foot. For that same foot-wide pizza, the distance around the entire crust would be somewhere around 3.14 feet, or if the pizza chef has measured it really precisely, 3.14159265359 feet: Pi! For people like us, nerds of a more linguistic rather than mathematical variety, the fact that the English word "pie" (round baked goods that come in handy for explaining abstract mathematical concepts) is so similar to "pi" (originally a letter of the greek alphabet chosen arbitrarily to represent a precise geometric value) is just a happy coincidence. The origins of the word "pie" have nothing to do with the letter/word "pi", though the similarity offers plenty of opportunities for cheesy pie-based explanations of pi, as well as an opportunity for English speaking pie purveyors to cash in on Pi Day. But there's another curious and equally nerdy factoid about Pi Day that few people appear to be talking about: it only really makes sense in the date system used in the United States. Think about it. If you're from the States, referring to March 14th as 3/14 seems like the most natural thing in the world. But in many other country in the world, March 14th would never be called 3/14. Instead, it would be called 14/3.
The map at the top of this piece shows the countries of the world arranged according to the date format they use. The massive sea of light blue indicates countries that primarily use the "day-month-year" format, i.e. "March 14, 2016" becomes 14/03/2016. The countries shown in yellow use "year-month-day" format: March 14, 2016 becomes 2016/03/14. The smattering of green, red, and gray shows countries that use some combination of these or other formats. And that lone blob of magenta in the top left of the map, the US, represents one of only three countries in the world to use a very special format: "month-day-year", the only format in which March 14, 2016 becomes 3/14/2016 and bears any meaningful resemblance to Pi. (The other two countries to use this format are Belieze and the Federated States of Micronesia; for a full explanation of the map, see this Wikipedia page.) Why is the US the only major country to use this format? Perhaps the most credible answer is that this format originated in Britain, and was later changed in Britian and other British colonies. But since the change happened after America broke away from the rule of Her Majesty, it never made it to America's shores. Actually, the "month-day-year" format may make sense linguistically, at least for languages (like English) that tend to speak dates in those terms. In other words, there's no reason that a language couldn't evolve so that saying "March 14th, 2016" didn't sound natural. It would then make sense to use "month-day-year" when writing dates numerically, following the accepted spoken format. But from a purely data-based point of view, this makes much less sense. Why should the month, the calendar value ranking higher than the day but lower than the year, be put first? It would be like referring to yourself with your middle name first. Logically speaking, the only formats that really make sense are either "day-month-year" or "year-month-day". Presumably, the industrial revolution and its proximity to the very heavily day-month-yearified continental Europe put pressure on Britain to make the switch, while the US remains steadfastly month-day-year. Today, Brits are slowly shifting their actual linguistic standards to fit this mold; read any article in a British news outlet, and you're likely to see "March 14th, 2016" written instead as "14 March 2016". Chalk it up to America's innate standoffishness with the rest of the world; the same thing that keeps us using ancient units of measure while the rest of the world uses the much more clean and simple Metric system. But hey, it does come in handy for oddities like Pi Day. Under our system, it comes every year; since there is no 14th month of the year "day-month-year", folks using that system will have to wait until January 3rd, 4159 - under their format, 3/1/4159 - to celebrate a Pi Day of their own. Comments are closed.
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