Pi-Day is a travesty of mathematical reasoning.

Here’s why. PI is an irrational number meaning that, to put it in simple terms, the numbers after the decimal point in 3.1415 … go on…

Pi-Day is a travesty of mathematical reasoning.

Here’s why. PI is an irrational number meaning that, to put it in simple terms, the numbers after the decimal point in 3.1415 … go on forever. They never stop. Importantly, they are given that special designation because we cannot express them.

Contrast that with our methods for counting time; in this case, the system of dates. We have an expression for today (at least in the US) of 3–14–15 which is the 14th of March 2015. Of course, we often, by convention, drop the “20" in our year count. And by convention in the US, the month appears before the day and, unless you are filling in the expiry date for your credit card on a badly designed e-Commerce site, we drop the “0" in “03" for the month of March.

Here is the important bit. We like to know the time of things so that we can work out that time has occurred. In other words, our time counting system is, by definition, always rational. Otherwise, it is hard to pinpoint. But today, people took that to extremes and tried to celebrate a Pi-minute (at 9:26am) or even a Pi-second. But in each case they did not identify somethng that was PI. Indeed, they identified something that came about BEFORE PI using any continous time version of the time system which does not actually exist because it can’t be described.

Herein lies the travesty. Our useful, conventional and arbitrary time system is never an irrational number and so can never coincide with PI. Never. Ever. It didn’t this year. It didn’t in 1592. It just didn’t. Even if you are happy having the hours after the year in your time description which I can’t imagine why you are.

And to those that say any celebration of something mathematical is good, I say, it is not good. Celebrations of things mathematical must — I repeat, must — make sense mathematically. Pi-day does not.