National Pi Day
National Pi Day celebrates math and pies.
Tuesday, March 14th, marks the 14th year that Pi Day has been a national holiday.since the U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation in 2009. Pi is the first letter of a Greek word which roughly means "circumference."
The concept of Pi actually dates back to Babylon and Egypt. The Rhind Papyrus used three steps to determine the area of a circle: find the diameter, subtract the 9th part of the circle, and square the answer. The height of the pyramids have the same relationship to the distance around the bases as does a circle's radius to its circumference. In the 1700s a Swiss mathematician and physicist named Euler popularized the lowercase Greek letter "pi" as the formal notation. The symbol for pi represents a constant: the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which is approximately 3.14159, but never settles with an exact number, thus calculations can never be fully and accurately resolved. The numbers just go on and on. New technology has added the capacity to find trillions of numbers past 3.14. All the same, Pi Day is a welcome holiday because it helps dispel the bleakness of midwinter, and who doesn't like to eat pie?
The holiday is observed on March 14th ever since Larry Shaw, who worked for San Francisco's interactive Exploratorium museum, began an annual celebration. It exponentially became popular.
He chose the date 3/14 because those are the first three significant numbers of the calculation. Pi Day is important because it is an opportunity to celebrate mathematics and science, to encourage interest in STEM studies, to play games together, and to eat pies, or throw them. Sounds like a superlative holiday.
The rest of the world seems to think so as well, as the holiday is now celebrated around the globe.
How to celebrate Pi Day? Get together, tell math jokes, play math or other games, and eat pies, could all be options.
Coming to mind are several pies made by settlers who lived here generations ago and did not have the luxuries of fruit, fancy ingredients, or convenient appliances to process them. The settlers made pies anyway, even when it would seem they had nothing to use for the fillings. Some of these recipes were called "desperation pies" and were popular even later during wartime when some ingredients were in short supply.
A more positive take on this situation is to call these pies "make-do pies." Ingenuity and creative skills came up with pies that mimicked the originals for which people had cravings or nostalgia.
For example, vinegar pie has no lemons but looks and tastes like the filling of a lemon meringue pie. Oatmeal pie simulates pecan pie. Shoofly pie, sour cream pie, buttermilk pie, and even green tomato pie all have simple ingredients. Recipes can be searched online or shared if requested, also math jokes. The pie pictured is a vinegar pie with the letter "pi" in the center. Enjoy!
