Today is Pi Day. What makes it Pi Day? Because today's date is 3.14. Pi is a mathematical constant defining the ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference. It's also a transcendental number, meaning that it's impossible to represent Pi as a finite sequence of numbers.  

In a tribute to this glorious number, a Canadian musician has decided to use diatonic scales on various musical instruments to illustrate what mathematical music may sound like.

The 2010 A.M. Turing Award has been announced and the recipient is Harvard professor Leslie Valiant. The Turing Award is basically considered equivalent to a Nobel Prize in computing. The prize is named after the famed British mathematician Alan M. Turing.

Geeky readers will recognize Turing's name, of course. He was a brilliant homosexual scientist responsible for breaking Nazi codes in World War II. He was also instrumental in building one of the world's first stored-program computers. Turing was later prosecuted by Britain for his homosexuality and forced to take female enzymes in an attempt to cure him. He later died of cyanide poisoning. The British government only recently formally apologized in 2009 for Turing’s treatment.

Turing is most famous for developing the Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence. In essence, the Turing Test is a language test. A human engages in a natural conversation with an ...

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An international team led by engineers from the University of Queensland in Australia have overcome a key hurdle to the real-life applications of quantum computing. In essence, using current technology, engineers have no way of efficiently measuring the behavior of qubits. Like computer bits, "qubits" are the smallest measure of quantum information. According to the article, just an 8-qubit quantum computer would require over a billion measurements. The measuring tasks increase exponentially with the number of qubits.

Dr. Alessandro Fedrizzi, co-author of this study published in Physical Review Letters states:

“Imagine that you're building a car but you can't test-drive it.This is the situation that quantum engineers are facing at the moment.”

The team developed a "compressive sensing algorithm" that for the first time allowed drastic simplification for measuring quantum processes.

Quantum computing is the holy grail of computer technology. We've covered quantum technology developments a ...

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Here's a nice little David vs. Goliath story...or rather Goliaths plural because the man competed against supercomputers and corporations. The Guinness Book of World Records has awarded the 55 year-old Shiguro Kondo a ranking for calculating Pi out to a whopping 5 trillion digits. The previous record holder was a French man who took Pi to 2.7 trillion digits.  During his interview, Kondo declared his intention to take Pi to over 10 trillion digits.

I'm perfectly fine with using just 3.14159.  It's also a great college cheer at MIT. You can't cheer with Pi using 5 trillion digits.