Today is a day dedicated to commemorating Pi? Happy Pi Day.....

Does it surprise you that there is a day dedicated to commemorating Pi? Happy Pi day!  

In the MM/DD format, 3.14 transform into March 14th. Thus happy Pi Day!

Pi Day is, of course, the annual celebration of π (pi), which is the immensely useful mathematical constant without which the world as we know it would not exist.

The most common approximation of pi is 3.14.

 First some history …

The earliest written approximation of Pi was found in Egypt and Babylon that were within 1% of the true value. There are clay tablets dated 1900 to 1600 BC that mathematically calculated Pi to be 3.125, very close to the true value of 3.14. But it was the Chinese mathematicians who accurately calculated pie to seven decimal places by the mid-first millennium. However, after that, no further progress was made until the late medieval period.

 With pie, we have a recipe for a Sumerian chicken pie dated from 2000 BC. I confess to being mildly curious what a pie made from a 4000-year-old recipe would taste like. It goes without saying, pie - the food - saw many more innovations, changes, and variations then Pi, which is a constant that we just need to calculate with increasing accuracy.

 So, it is on that day, that we eat pie and enjoy the geeky joke the Pi is needed to calculate the circumference of a circular pie.

 The history of Pi is interesting, as is the history of pie, and… whilst it's a long bow to draw – can procurement can learn something from both?

 Obviously, both Pi and pie were born out of utility.

We humans needed to build and make things for which we needed trigonometry and geometry. From our attempts to do the calculations we needed, including but not limited to the circumference of a circle, we came up with a number that made the formula work. We then labeled it a mathematical constant and had been using it ever since.

Consider this; there might be a formula out there in the vast ocean of undiscovered knowledge that allows us to calculate the circumference of a circle without Pi. But while there might be a different way out there, we must contend with what we have. For the ancient Babylonians, that meant making do with a Pi value that was within 1% of the actual value.

 For us in procurement, that may mean doing the best we can with what we have. We should take comfort from the fact that the Babylonians were able to build Ziggurats that still stand, even though they only knew Pi accurate to one decimal point.

 As for the pie of the edible variety, the most important thing procurement professionals can learn from pie, is that it exists because it is easy to transport. A truth about human existence and especially human civilisation are that easy of storage and transport trumps a lot of other features. So, as we move forward into the world of Procurement 4.0, let’s remember the pi that made the wheel possible and the pie that proved a great way to transport food on said wheels.

Handy definitions to get you through π day:

pi 1 |pī| noun - the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet ( Π, π), transliterated as ‘p.’

the numerical value of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter (approximately 3.14159).[from the initial letter of Greek periphereia ‘circumference.’]

(Pi) [ followed by Latin genitive ] Astronomy the sixteenth star in a constellation: Pi Herculis.

Chemistry & Physics relating to or denoting an electron or orbital with one unit of angular momentum about an internuclear axis.

(PI) A business specialising in data analysis, spend analysis and generating deep insights!

PIE - pie 1 |pī| noun a baked dish of fruit, or meat and vegetables, typically with a top and base of pastry. Delicious!

Purchasing Index loves ‘geeking out’ on analysis and insights –should you need a few data-nerds doing the heavy analysis and fact-checking for you – we love to help!