Steven Strogatz, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences and author of "The Joy of X," explains the origin and meaning of pi in a New York Times op-ed.
"For some people, Pi Day is an occasion to marvel at circles, long revered as symbols of perfection, reincarnation and the cycles of nature," Strogatz writes. "But it is the domestication of infinity that we really should be celebrating. Mathematically, pi is less a child of geometry than an early ancestor of calculus, the branch of mathematics, devised in the 17th century, that deals with anything that curves, moves or changes continuously."
Adam T. Smith/Provided
Open through Dec. 31, 'Sacred Ground' highlights findings from a four-year archaeological excavation of Ithaca’s St. James A.M.E. Zion Church conducted by Cornell faculty, students and Ithaca school children from 2021–2024.
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
An artist's conception of a precessing binary black hole. The black holes, which will ultimately spiral together into one larger black hole, are shown here orbiting one another in a plane. The black holes are spinning in a non-aligned fashion, which means they are tilted relative to the overall orbital motion of the pair. This causes the orbit to precess like a top spinning along a tilted axis.
