by 
Since we are PI (Potomac Indexing), we’ve always held the mathematical constant, π, close to our hearts and use it in our logo. So, today being π day, we are duly celebrating the usefulness of this great and ultimately impossible-to-pin-down number (more on π’s wonderfully irrational and transcendental qualities at Wikipedia, here).
Pi and Indexing
As indexers and taxonomists, we work with natural language every day (the kind used to write this blog and discuss with friends and colleagues). We also live with the “imperfect subtlety” that is natural language and which creates the many judgment calls we make about what subjects are being discussed in a book or what keywords people would really look up in a search function. We know that there is no way to always provide an exact correlation between a term and the concept it belongs to, or even to know if this mention of a name provides a complete reference of that person’s role in a book. And often there are multiple options to come up with the “best” term for something.
Natural languages just provide so many nuances and options as a semantic target that getting a bullseye still requires the also-nuanced intelligence of the human mind. So far, at least. We continue to await the day when AI’s ability to judge semantics will equal that of a human indexer.
And so with pi: it helps us to measure a circle, but we can never make it completely accurate. There will always be a bit of a “guesstimate” involved. But pi’s usefulness continues to allow us to better understand the geometry of our universe, even without absolute accuracy.
Celebrating Pi Day
Visit NASA’s nerd-tastic PI Day Challenge for students and educators.
It seems that in the 19th century, one mathematician tried to simplify PI by legislation in Indiana. Check out ABC’s story for the results.
The TED-Ed folks have a short video from 2013 about properties of pi.
At Harvard three years ago, they recited PI to celebrate the day. Learn more in this video.
And there’s an official PI Day organization, so if the previous links haven’t filled your mind’s appetite for pi, you can digest some more facts here.
Leave a Reply