Have some Pi

This weekend is filled with memorable days! Yesterday, it was Friday the 13th. Today, math enthusiasts around the world are celebrating Pi Day.

What’s Pi Day? Well, Pi is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. A shortened version of Pi is 3.1415926535. If you abbreviate that number further and turn it into a date, it becomes 3.14 or March 14th. That’s why people celebrate it on this day.

So, how do people celebrate the day? Well, here are 5 ideas from the official Pi Day web site and wikiHow:

1. Eat ‘pi’ foods. Many creative ways exist to do this. First, there’s the punny approach, like eating pineapple, pizza, or pine nuts and drinking pina coladas or pineapple juice. Second, there’s the shape approach, like making cookies or pancakes shaped like pi or making a pie with a pi cut out of the center of the crust. Of course, whatever you do, Pi Day is simply incomplete without eating pie, even if you don’t feel artistic enough to carve the pi symbol out of the top.
2. Use a piece of string to “prove” Pi by measuring other circles’ circumference & diameter.
3. Recite as many digits of Pi as you can as a team taking turns, or have a memorization contest and the winner gets to eat Pie first.
4. Do a pi mile run. Go on a run for pi miles. You can take this a step further by organizing a pi mile run.
5. Get married. There’s nothing more romantic than being married to the one you love at 1:59:26 PM on March 14th, to show that, like Pi, your love will continue forever. The funny thing is that we actually have friends who got married today. I guess they took this suggestion a little too seriously..haha!

Regardless of how you celebrated it, I hope you had a happy Pi Day. And if you didn’t celebrate it, there’s always next year. I know you can’t wait!

Next up…St. Pattty’s Day.