Happy Pi Day!

Image courtesy of Log Cabin Cooking

Happy Friday Pi Day, everyone! To celebrate, I hope you all had a nice slice of pie. Or even pizza. Or, if you’re really ambitious, learn as many digits of pi as you can (click here to learn pi up to the 10,000 digit). I’ll start you off: 3.14….

Okay, once you’re done celebrating, check out these awesome facts about pi and Pi Day!

1. Pi is defined as the distance around a perfect circle, or the circumference, divided by the distance across it, or the diameter.

2. Pi is also involved in calculating the area of a circle, the volume of a sphere, and many other mathematical formulas you might need in the sciences.

3. Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday.

4. Throughout history, people have been captivated by pi because there is no way to calculate it exactly by a simple division on your calculator. Plus, its digits go on infinitely, without any pattern in the numbers. 3.1415926535897932 … etc. 

5. Pi Day began as a small gathering with mostly museum staff. Now it’s a public pi extravaganza featuring a “Pi procession,” whose attendees get a number — 0 to 9 — and line up in the order of pi’s digits.

6. In fact, from Pi Day specials in Chicago restaurants to pie-throwing contests in Boston, Pi Day is celebrated in many ways throughout the country–even online at such websites as piday.org.

7. One of the main reasons for Pi Day’s growing popularity is that people all around the world are hungry to make science and math fun and interesting. Pi Day gives people a great excuse to throw away the fear of math and see the fun instead.

So what does Pi Day have to do with creative writing? Good question. It actually can be a great tool in writing poetry and music. Here’s what you do: Each number of pie represents how many words or syllables go on a line. Write your song lyrics or poem started with 3 words, then 1 word, then 4 words, then 1 word, and so on as you progress through however many digits of pi you want.

Here’s an example:

A long road

Silent.

Waiting for the sunrise

Dawn.

A lone car draws near.

Driving around a perfect circle, and then across it.

Neat, huh? I hope you learned something new about pi and celebrating Pi Day. Have a comment or want to share how you celebrated today? Leave a comment! I’d love to hear about it.