Pi Day: five fun facts about 3.14

March 14, or 3.14, is Pi Day. Get it? Pi Day celebrates all things related to the mathematical constant that measures the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Here are five things you should know about π. 

3. It has stretched the bounds of the human mind

Sure, a computer can calculate trillions of pi’s decimals, but what about the human mind?

The current pi memory champion is a retired Japanese engineer Akira Haraguchi, who in 2006 recited 100,000 digits in front of witnesses in Tokyo. The event took nearly 17 hours. Previously, Mr. Haraguchi set three earlier records by reciting 54,000 digits in September 2004, 68,000 digits in December 2004, and 83,431 in July 2005. To date, however, the Guinness Book of World Records has not officially verified Haraguchi’s attempts.

The current Guinness-record holder for memorized digits of pi is held by Lu Chao, a 24-year-old student from China, who recited 67,890 digits in 24 hours and four minutes. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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