Celebrating Pi Day with Mathnasium
Article published in Longmeadow Neighbors
(March 2023)
EXPERT CONTRIBUTOR
ALISON MCDONOUGH
Math Tutor
Mathnasium
413 612 2877
longmeadow@mathnasium.com
Mathnasium.com/longmeadow
Happy Pi Day!
Every March 14th, math students and teachers around the world come together to celebrate Pi Day, the holiday that honors the mathematical constant pi. Pi, or 3.14159…, is the distance around a circle divided by the distance across its middle, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
Pi is one of the most important numbers in math, and approximations of it date back to ancient Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations. Since then, mathematicians have spent millennia trying to calculate as many decimal places of pi as accurately as possible. Isaac Newton, an inventor of calculus, once calculated pi to sixteen decimal places, which prompted him to remark to a friend, "I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time."
Newton’s invention, however, soon led to other mathematicians calculating pi to hundreds of decimal places. With the invention of the computer, hundreds of decimal places became thousands, then millions, then more. Last year, Japanese computer scientist Emma Haruka Iwao calculated 100 trillion decimal places of pi, using 25 computers running for about four months. In 2015, Rajveer Meena set the Guinness World Record by memorizing 70,000 decimal digits of pi.
While pi is a vitally important number, finding more and more decimal places of it has little practical value. NASA uses only fifteen digits for their rocket science calculations, and 40 digits is all that’s needed for a scientist to calculate the size of the known universe accurate to the size of a single atom. Still, humans continue to calculate and memorize more and more digits of pi for love of the challenge and of the number itself.
The first Pi Day was celebrated in 1988 at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, at exactly 1:59 PM. Since then, it has slowly but surely risen in popularity, and in 2009 was designated an official day by Congress.
How Should We Celebrate Pi Day?
There’s no wrong way to celebrate Pi Day, but the best way is with pie, of course! Pie is the perfect desert for Pi Day, both because of its name and its shape. A great way to celebrate Pi Day is to bake or buy your favorite pie. Before eating, use a string to measure the distance around the edge of the pie, and the distance across the center of the pie. Divide the first number by the second, and see how close your pie is to pi!
Another great way to celebrate Pi Day is to make a Pi bracelet or necklace with beads. Pick a different color to represent each digit, and string the colored beads in the order of the digits of pi.
Whether you celebrate Pi Day by memorizing digits, making bracelets, or baking pie, we at Mathnasium hope that your Pi Day is filled with math and filled with fun!
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