Today, March 14, is Pi Day, the annual celebration of the mathematical constant denoted by the Greek letter π, facilitated by the all-numeric date format observed in the United States and precious few other places, namely month-day-year or MDY.
The MDY format makes today 3/14 or 3.14, the latter being the first digits of the numerical approximation of π, or 3.14159.
For those readers who missed that year in school , Π is a mathematical constant equal to a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter. It is generally approximated as 3.14159 because its decimal representation never ends.
The idea of Pi Day was conceived of at the San Francisco Exploratorium, a museum that covers science, technology, and the arts founded by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, in 1988 by physicist and curator Larry Shaw. To Shaw, pi seemed like the perfect subject of scientific veneration and celebration and it conveniently had a fortunate homophone in the word “pie,” which of course are shaped like a circle and have a diameter and a circumference. The tasty dessert seemed like it would be an excellent tool to teach people about, ahem, the two-letter pi.
Since 1988, the idea has gone far beyond the pie shops of the Bay Area (it’s rumored even Mrs. Lovett makes delicious pies on Pi Day), and in 2019, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization designated March 14 as the International Day of Mathematics.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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