Happy Pi Day! Yes, it’s that time of year again when the month and day (in the American form of date representation) for those legendary 3 digits 3/14, also known as the beginning of the mathematical term Pi1. Being The Count, however, I’m certainly not satisfied with just one Pi Day each year, or just matching 3 digits of Pi for my festivities. No, I must venture forth to find other Math-related dates to share the joy that is the geeky holiday.


Now, Pi Day comes every year but only in America, as the European version of date display comes Day then Month. Unfortunately, this leaves Europe with no way to put forth 3.14 (note, they use a period (.) instead of a slash (/)), as alas, there are only 12 months. For the most part, Europe seems to be out of luck. After searching several dozen math constants2, and I can’t find any that start with a number from 1-30, and have 2 digits after the decimal that form a number less than 13. Viswanath’s Constant3 comes closest, but it looks like we’ll just have to exclude Europeans from our celbratory antics… No pie for you!

Not so fast! Let’s try not to leave them out of all the fun. I present below some alternatives to Pi day, some of which can even be translated to Day before Month!

We’ll have to wait a bit for these extra-geeky days to arrive, but at least we have today! So, those of you who can celebrate Pi day, run out to your Marie Callander’s or Coco’s, or even the local Denny’s, grab a slice, and enjoy! Save some room for Super Pi Day in a few years though, ok?

The Count

1. Pi – the math constant, not the pastry
2. Math Constants
3. Viswanath’s Constant
4. What kind of pie are you?
5. XKCD on e and Pi

Happy Birthday to me. Yes, that’s right, you’re friendly Count was born 40 years ago today, which just happened to be Labor Day in 1969. In light of this special event, I’ve prepared a little set of numbers just for fun. None of this is particularly important, just a bit of mind-candy for my birthday. So let’s go!

40 years on this Earth has some easy conversions into smaller time periods. 480 months makes 2,080 weeks pretty easily. Days is more of a problem, as there are some irregularities in the Leap Day counts. As it happens, those 40 years turned into 14,600 days at 365/year plus 10 leap days is 14,610 total days. This computes to 350,400 hours, times 60 for 21,024,000 minutes, and again for 1,261,440,000 seconds. That’s right, over a billion seconds I’ve been alive!


Just because I lived all those 40 years on Earth, doesn’t mean that time can’t be measured by the years of the other planets in our system. Check out how long my life has been on those planets!1

I’ve done a fair bit of travelling in my life; as an Army brat, you’re sent across the country or across the world every 3 or 4 years. Then again, merely moving around on the face of this planet is chump change compared to how far I (and you) have really travelled during my life. Just sitting on the surface of Earth means I travelled around 40,076 km/day (the planetary circumference2), for a total of 585,109,600 km travelled in 14,600 Earth-sized circles. With an orbital path of 240,800,000 km/year3, I’ve also travelled 9,632,000,000 km (1/10th of 1 percent of a light year) in larger circles around the Sun. Finally, the Sun’s moves along its orbital path in the galaxy at about 251 km/s. At this rate, I’ve traveled over 316.6 billion km, over 1/30th of a light year through the universe during my life… so far.

Hey, this was fun! I hope you’ve enjoyed my numerical recounting (get it?) of my life. I feel a lot better about just how small a number 40 is. Maybe I’m not so old, after all.

The Count

1. Convert Earth years to other planets
2. Earth on Wikipedia
3. Orbital lengths
4. The Sun on Wikipedia

Ah, there’s nothing quite like the geek joke. When you hear one, you’re torn between not wanting to look stupid and not wanting to look too smart! I’ve heard a lot of them in my time, and thought I’d share some of my favorites with you here.

Not only does this joke require some small bit of knowledge to get, but this classic example of the geek joke even refers to the separation between those who will get the joke and the rest of humanity. Not a bad start.

There are many, many versions of this joke that shows how math and science theories don’t quite always apply to the real world. I can just imagine these guys standing next to each other; the shooters on each side and the third guy in the middle.

This joke exposes the fact that you can have a math-geek joke with no numbers, variables, or any math at all really. Sure, you could argue it’s a philosophy joke more than a math joke, but those two fields are linked more closely than you might think. It’s still a great example of a joke that you need to be a geek to get.

I have several friends who still think puns are the height of humor. I can’t agree with that, but I can see that they still play an important part in the jokes of today. Here we have a great example of a math-based pun. Can you guess how much the extra-large order costs? How great to only need to put prices on the first two menu items!

This is by far my favorite programming joke. There’s just something truly elegant about something entirely non-contrived that just happens to mean something both to those who use the Julian calendar as well as those of us who deal in non-decimal bases.


There they are, some classic examples of the “geek joke”. I hope you’ve found at least one you hadn’t heard before and maybe even chuckled a little. As far as I know, all of these jokes are public domain, so feel free to treat them as your own. Keep in mind, however, that you may want to choose your audience carefully; a joke that needs explaining is hardly ever funny. Please feel free to post your own jokes in the comments; I’d love to read them.


The Count