I gotta tell you guys--I almost forgot completely that today was Pi Day, the geekiest holiday on the entire calendar (Star Wars Day got nothin' on us). Daylight Saving Time messed up my biological clock hardcore, and for about an hour after I woke up, I failed to acknowledge the staggering significance of today's date. Then, standing in the shower, ruminating on the hidden, spiritual character of mathematics (like I do), I had a sudden flash of panic: It's Pi Day! My Geekologists are waiting to celebrate! I gotta get to a computer! And that, my friends, is precisely what I did.
So, welcome to the biggest Pi Day party on the Internet!
In case you're a little confused why we're all wearing party hats and chowing down on baked desserts: Today, March 14, is a holiday near and dear to the hearts of geeks worldwide. Why? Well, because the date, 3/14, is the calendar equivalent of the number 3.14--commonly used as an approximation of the constant pi. Pi is the ratio between any circle's circumference and its diameter, unless you're doing math with a Hound of Tindalos in some weird non-Euclidean plane or something. Anyway, as a constant, pi is pretty much indispensable. It shows up in equations all over mathematics and the sciences, helping the world's geeks figure out things like the area of a disk and playing a crucial role in physics expressions like Heisenberg's uncertainy principle. Pi is definitely a busy number--which might be because it never ends. That's right--pi is an irrational number, meaning its decimal approximations never repeat and thus never terminate.
Therefore, ain't no party like a pi party, 'cause a pi party don't stop. And that, my friends, is why we celebrate our favorite mathematical constant every March 14th. How, exactly, does one celebrate Pi Day? For a holiday made possible by a ton of complex calculations, Pi Day is actually pretty chill. The first (and, we'd argue, best) way to enjoy Pi Day is to eat pie. Any kind of pie is fair game--if your local pizza place will arrange pepperoni in the shape of the Greek letter du jour, more power to you. Shepherd's pie? Hey, it's 2011, go nuts. Traditionally, though, Pi Day calls for the consumption of your usual fruit and cream pies. I recommend carrying around a whoopie pie in case you can't convince your co-workers to splurge for a custom-carved masterpiece. Delicious.
Another Pi Day standby is reciting the digits of pi. Have some fun with this one. All together now:
If you're a Pi Day veteran, you might want to check out some of pi's appearance on both the small screen and silver screen. The 1998 movie Pi is a psychological thriller by none other than Darren Aronofsky. Pi was Aronofsky's directorial debut--so, basically, without pi, there is no Black Swan. Here's a trailer:
Pi, the movie, also launched the career of composer Clint Mansell, who's worked with Aronofsky on his most memorable films. Mansell is writing the score for upcoming RPG Mass Effect 3. So, no pi, no ME3? That is one important number.
There's also an episode from the original Star Trek series--"Wolf in the Fold"--in which pi basically saves the day for everyone involved.
If you're more the literary type, you can check out the poem "Pi" by Wislawa Szymborska. An excerpt:
The caravan of digits that is pi
does not stop at the edge of the page,
but runs off the table and into the air,
over the wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, the clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bloatedness and bottomlessness.
Oh how short, all but mouse-like is the comet's tail!
Students hoping to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also have reason to celebrate today, as MIT often mails out its application decision letters on Pi Day. Appropriate--one of the school's cheers includes the line, "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, 3.14159!" Those guys live every day like it's Pi Day.
That's about all the pi I can throw at you for now, Geekologists--feel free to celebrate further in the comments. For now, I am off to hunt for hilarious pie charts.
