Geeking out on Pi Day
Ways to go way beyond 3.1415926535...
For many, the number Pi - also known as Archimedes’ constant or Ludolph’s number - is just something we plugged into math problems on the SAT. But to mathematicians, Pi is revered - worshipped even - for its mind-boggling importance to our understanding of the Universe. And because its decimal points extend to infinity, it’s called both irrational and transcendent, sort of like how I remember vintage Bobcat Goldthwait. Pi is even a stress test for computer hardware. Tell a computer to calculate Pi and if it breaks, you’ve got a clunker (though last year, a supercomputer calculated pi to more than 62 trillion digits which qualified it as, um, a supercomputer).
So today, March 14, we celebrate “Pi Day”, a term coined by mathemetician Larry Shaw in 1998, as a celebration of math and discovery. In 2009 Congress designated Pi Day - March 14 - as a National Holiday. Even Weird Al got Pi Fever, claiming he knew “Pi to a thousand places” in his parody smash, “White and Nerdy”.
But even he was just getting started because, well, there is no end to Pi.
Today, NASA has a multi-day celebration of Pi Day complete with math puzzles and ideas for how to celebrate Pi. The Jet Propulsion Lab has a pretty cool set of problems for the Pi Obsessed to tackle them with your kids or share with your schoolteachers.
But if you want to go “big” on Pi Day, there’s no better place to do it than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I worked at MIT for more than a decade, and the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center is a client of my firm, Rootstock Philanthropy. The place takes Pi-worship to 11. The MIT admissions office blasts out its admissions decisions at 1:59 on Pi Day (3/14 1:59, the 1st 5 decimal places of “Pi”), student groups host more pie-themed fundraisers than you can possibly imagine, the Alumni Website shares an offbeat newsletter called a Slice of MIT with videos celebrating Pi Day. There are occasional Pi Day races of 3.14 miles, Pi Day Pie Eating Contests, Math Marathons, you name it.
But whatever you do, as tempting as it might be, don’t eat one of these on Pi Day. It might say “pie” on the package, but let’s face it: Pies are round. This one isn’t:
