Today is Pi day! Let's P-a-r-t-e-e-e !
Huh?
Okay, you're not a math nerd. You haven't been waiting all year to spend March 14 playing pie-in-the-face with other math nerds.
But, you should at least be aware.
Today is March 14, or 3.14, which is Pi. Get it? Mathematicians gather to party, celebrating science's most famous strange number -- Pi. And as fate would have it, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday. The party just got exciting.Time to get irrational.
NO FRACTIONS ABOUT IT, IT'S IRRATIONAL
Pi begins with 3.1415926535 ...ad infinitum without repeating. It is the figure obtained when the circumference of a circle is divided by its diameter, and it cannot be expressed as a fraction -- making it an irrational number. Computers have calculated it to more than one trillion digits past the decimal point.
It's fundamental throughout the field of mathematics. You can find it in the measurements of the Great Pyramid. Mathematicians have worked hard trying to find patterns in its infinite string of digits, convinced there is a message in the math.
March 14 has been a "geek holiday" for more than 20 years after a physicist at the San Francisco Exploratorium science exhibition began Pi Day. It has snowballed into an international event, with Pi parties and educational events in many countries all over the map.
HOORAY, IT'S A GEEK HOLIDAY
At the Exploratorium today a parade of people will circle approximately 3.14 times around a shrine to Pi -- and then eat pie.
At other parties devotees will compete, reciting as many decimal places for Pi as they possibly can. Just so you'll know, the world record is held by Lu Chao, a 24 year-old graduate student from China, who took 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite to the 67,890th decimal place of Pi without an error. Hey -- you gotta dream, follow it.
There is an organization called the World Federation of Pi. Members will log on to the the website Mathematicianspictures.com to watch a giant Pi symbol drop like the crystal ball in Times Square on New Year's Eve. And, you know how exciting that is.
Many geeksters will make Pi-pies which brings the double benefit of being both a homophone of the word pi and a circle. And with these pies they either eat them or throw them at each other. Oh boy!
MOTOWN HAIKU'S
In Motown, in honor of this number of infinite length and importance, the Detroit Free Press is sponsoring a Pi-themed haiku contest. Everyone knows that a haiku is a 3-line poem with alternating lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. But, for extra credit, you can submit a Pi-ku, with alternating lines of 3, 1 and 4 syllables. Get it? The newspaper gets you started with one of its own haiku's:
Infinite unknowns
Made calc class so confusing
Or am I alone?
WHO DOESN'T LOVE MATH ?
Still, no matter how much fun a kid could have studying mathematics and partying every year on March 14, most kids would rather do almost anything else. In a survey of 11- to 13-year-olds spearheaded by the Raytheon Company, 84 percent of children reported a preference for cleaning their rooms, eating their vegetables or going to the dentist when the alternative was doing math homework, according to Scientific American.
For even more information, there is a detailed history of pi at the Pi Day website.
By Sharon McEachern
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