Pi Day Chain GangsAll it takes is paper, tape, and a whole lot of determination. One color per digit! Can your school make the rankings?

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Hey, Pi People!

Hope you’re all geared up for a great Pi Day 2019! As for me, my Pi Day celebration started nice and early. I was a special guest at what I would consider to be one of the two biggest Pi Day celebrations on the planet: Pi Day Princeton! (I was lucky enough to visit the other one last year.)

The lovely and historic town of Princeton, New Jersey has, for more than a decade now, put on quite the Pi Day party.  A fellow you may have heard of named Al Einstein spent the final 22 years of his life here, and oh, by the way, he was born on March 14.  So, in a beautiful fusion of math and science (and history) excitement, Princeton has perfected the art of celebrating Pi and Einstein at once!

I can’t say enough about how much fun I had on March 9 (they hold the festivities on the Saturday prior to 3/14, for max access to fun).  My day began with a no-hands, pie-eating contest (I did participate but was blown away by some local pros with vacuum-like pie consumption skills).

We then threw a surprise birthday party for ol’ Albert, who looks pretty good for 140, and followed that with a kids’ Einstein costume contest that I got to help judge.  Little 4-year-old Eleanor was the most adorable Einstein you could ever imagine (if there is such a thing!), and she won the prize of an oversized check for $314.15 and the lifelong privilege of joining the panel of judges.

I then got to judge a far more serious event – the Pi digit recitation contest.  My fellow judges included the first person ever to memorize more than 10,000 digits, and the current North American record holder at 15,314 digits!  My puny 250 digits paled in comparison to these two titans, but we made a solid judging bench.  (Oh yeah, a legit Einstein impersonator/expert was the fourth judge, just for good measure!)

The contest was won in dramatic fashion by 12-year-old Kanayo, who paced in a figure-8 as he recited – wait for it – 1,171 digits!  (Don’t forget to share your students’ memory feats.)  And he told me afterward that he actually knows upwards of 3,000 digits – amazing!  He was honored with a surprise appearance and rap performance by Pi Diddy.

The afternoon continued with a parade around the town square, an apple pie bake-off contest, and a pub crawl for the grown-ups to reflect on the nonstop Pi/Einstein bonanza that was.

If you live anywhere remotely near Princeton, NJ, I would highly recommend you catch the festivities next year!  Just mark that Saturday before 3/14 on your calendar.

Well, if your real Pi Day is half as much fun as my pre-Pi Day was, then you’re in for a great one!

Your Pi pal,

Luke

Pi Inspires Art Among the countless artistic tributes to pi, Michael Albert’s 777-digit handmade collage really stands out. Learn more.

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Partners in Pi,

This year’s Pi Day just feels right. After a few years of paused traditions, unspoken digits, and uneaten slices, Pi Day 2023 feels like a good old fashioned, typical Pi Day… and that’s a good thing! It falls on a Tuesday, which is a perfectly bland day in the school and work week to spice up with your favorite celebrations from yesteryear… or with a brand new idea that you’ve been cooking up.

Creativity certainly springs eternal in the Pi community: schools and companies are starting new gatherings, digit memory contests are popping up everywhere, and those with musical and lyrical gifts have gotten back to work writing new song tributes, including folks like high school teacher Mr. Jacques and science writer Devin Powell. (Check out their brand new musical offerings on the Your Music page!)

This marks the 36th Pi Day in the holiday’s official modern era — that’s an even three dozen!  I’m so fortunate to been actively involved in 25 of them (wow, I’m starting to feel a bit… infinite!).  I will always draw energy from the collective buzz around the holiday as it approaches, and maybe this is just an old timer talking, but this one really does feel like we as a Pi community are fully back in business, and ready to eat up, memorize, sing out, and celebrate!

Pi Day Forever,

Luke

Miles of Pi?Want to be a part of Pi? Craft a digit on a fabric square, and send it to artist Sally Sellers. She stitched thousands together for 3.14.15, and is still at it. Learn more.

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Saturday, March 14, 2020 feels like a very long time ago.  As I’ve said before, some of my favorite Pi Days of all time have been on Saturdays, including, of course, 3.14.15, the Pi Day of the Century.  So I had naturally been looking forward to it, as I’m sure you were.  But alas, instead of marking another great moment in the story of our favorite number, 3.14.20 marked one of the first moments in a new and not-so-great story that, a year later, isn’t quite over.

In many ways, the last year has felt irrational, full of randomness, and, if nothing else, infinite.  While these are the qualities that we celebrate about ol’ 3.14159, they’re much harsher to face in the real-life form of a grinding global pandemic.  I have personally been fortunate not to experience very much hardship as a result, nor to lose anyone close to me to it, and my heart goes out fully to those of you who have.  If boredom and monotony feel infinite, then how much more unending are the feelings of grief and loss?

But there’s hope.  Soon we’ll be able to go out, gather, and do silly and superfluous things again.  Maybe some of us are already there, but for many of us, Pi Day 2021 will come and go quietly on a Sunday, without much of a trace.  For those of us still stuck in neutral, it’s my hope that teachers, kids, and number lovers all over the world can pause on Sunday to smile, hum a Pi Day carol or two to themselves, and look forward to the end of this seemingly endless string of digits, er, days that we don’t ever want to relive or recount.

We need the nonsense of Pi Day — in our classrooms, in our imaginations, and heck, even in our hearts.  And when Pi Day 2022 finally crests the horizon, let’s never forget the feeling of having to leave a couple of pages blank in the journal of our favorite number.  Let’s cherish the pages we can fill in.  Let’s make Pi Day, and every day, count.

With infinite love for Pi and all of Pi’s friends,

Luke

The Pi Rap Lives OnIt’s been performed by Pi Diddy from coast to coast, and schools everywhere continue to crank it up each March 14th. Have you heard it yet?

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Hi friends,

It’s usually a good thing when Pi Day falls on a Saturday. The last two times this has taken place were both momentous dates in our shared history of Pi:

[list type=”check”]

  • 2015:  March 14 fell on a Saturday in 2015, which, of course, marked the Pi Day of the Century (3.14.15).  I’ll never forget where I was – cheering at the precise moment with 500 fellow math lovers at a gathering in Los Angeles, where I later gave a keynote lecture and  my pal Pi Diddy interrupted the official digit memory contest with a surprise rap performance.  (He’s such a spotlight-hog.)
  • 2009:  This Pi Day Saturday capped off the end of a historic week in which the U.S. House of Representatives debated and (not quite unanimously) passed a resolution to recognize and honor our favorite holiday.  I was also with a group of about 250 math folks on the big day, speaking, performing, and sharing the breaking news coming out of the halls of Congress.

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But alas, Saturday, March 14, 2020 came and went with a bit of a whimper for most of us, myself included.  While many kids continued to crank out ever-impressive additions to the rankings, we’ve generally had bigger things on our mind this year than the joy of an infinitely beautiful number.  Instead, we’ve all been focused on bending the curve of the spread of the covid-19 virus away from infinity and toward zero.  Kudos to everyone who has been making sacrifices and helping their fellow humans during this time of worldwide need.

The nice thing about infinity is that there will always be another digit, and there will always be another Pi Day.  For this one, we Pi people just had to keep it simple and celebrate quietly.  For my part, I sang Pi Day carols with my kids over slices of apple pie.  Good enough for 3.14.20.  Looking forward to 3.14.21.

Stay healthy and never stop appreciating the beauty in the world around us – numerical and otherwise!

Luke

Pi on the Brain We all know that memorizing digits of pi is good brain exercise, but can it actually make us better at math? What does neuroscience tell us about all of this? Learn more.

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We all know that memorizing digits of pi is good brain exercise, but can it actually make us better at math? What does neuroscience tell us about all of this? Learn more.

Pals in Pi,

Happy Monday!  In the good old days, I would always root for Pi Day to fall on a weekday.  The glow of the holiday shines brightest when teachers and students are together at school on the actual 3/14 and the raucous revelry is uninhibited.

And so perhaps it’s fitting that the last two Pi Days have fallen on a Saturday and a Sunday.  For many of us, they’ve landed as silently as a leaf drifting down to a snowy forest floor.  We’ve had much bigger things on our minds and hearts over the past two years, dating back, for many parts of the U.S., to a new way of life that began very suddenly on none other than March 14, 2020.

Call it a Pi-atus, or a verrry long weekend, or whatever you like.  It’s Monday, kids are back at school, and Pi Day is ready to play!

So, just like any other activity that we’ve set aside for the last couple years, we’re going to have to warm up our mathematical muscles before we can sprint again.  Let this year’s Pi Day be part of that rediscovery and renewal, reminding all of us how great it feels to share something silly again.

It’s Monday… so get out there and celebrate! :-)

Luke