March 14 is considered ‘Pi Day’ because when the date is typed out numerically, it resembles the first three digits of pi, 3.14.
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Yesterday marked the confluence of round baked goods (sweet and savory), iconic slapstick, the Greek alphabet and the best known and most widely mystifying mathematical constant: March 14, “Pi Day.”
Humans discovered pi about 4,000 years ago, despite what, to the average person, would seem like a remarkably obscure origin: Want to know the area of a circle? You need to multiply the square of the radius by a number of about 3, eventually given the name of the Greek letter “pi.”
About 3, but not quite.
The thing that makes pi endlessly fascinating is the endlessness. While most people use 3.14 as good enough for calculations, the numbers to the right of the decimal go on, as it were, ad infinitum. You could set the world’s fastest computer to calculate it to the last digit, and the work would never end.
Star Trek TOS fans will immediately cite the 1967 “Wolf in the Fold” episode, in which Spock outsmarted a sentient entity murderously occupying the ship’s computers by issuing a “Class A compulsory directive: Compute to the last digit of pi.” The Vulcan officer then points out, “As we know, the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution. The computer banks will work on this problem to the exclusion of all else until we order it to stop.”And yes, “transcendental” is accurate, though it has nothing to do with meditation — unless you find reciting the digits of pi as meditative.
Pi allows us to almost literally “square the peg,” as in drawing a square with the same area as a circle. Fun note: It also raised a challenge that —as far as we can tell — has yet to be met, explained in a 2024 Scientific American article: Does multiplying pi by itself repeatedly produce a whole number?
For the non-math inclined, celebrating “Pi Day” has, like the number, generated endless options. Friday’s paper reported one of the most recent, with Luzerne County Community College’s Math Club sponsoring the third annual Pi Day Cornhole tournament. Why Cornhole? Well, even if the beanbag may be square, the hole is round. Besides, there was also Pizza, a “pie”
The sound-alike link of pi and pie is almost certainly coincidental. The latter seems to have emerged around the 1300s, with an uncertain origin. But who cares. If “Pi Day” conflates with “Pie Day,” you can eat them, bake them, and/or slap them in someone’s face.
That last has been one way some schools celebrate Pi Day. In 2023 Dallas Intermediate School let students smash pie plates full of whipped cream into the faces of 16 administrators, faculty and staff members —including Principal Tom Traver, who entered the gym dressed as Captain Underpants. The event, held a day late due to weather, also rewarded students for raising $5,770 in the Kids Heart Challenge for the American Heart Association.
Pi Day at our schools has meant math disguised as games (tossing paper plates and measuring the distance), pie baking contests, and at the old Dallas High School in 2003, students making a “pi chain” by forming 7,147 links of oval paper rings in 10 different colors,one for each digit from 0 to 9.
All of which prompts us to co-opt Homer Simpson’s famous utterance:
“Mmmmm, pi!”
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