I am wholly unprepared for this year’s Pi Day. In year’s past, I baked pie for Pi Day. I 3D printed Pi shaped cookie cutters and made cookies out of leftover pie crust. Last year, I even memorized 300 digits of Pi!
Pi Day pies
The one on the left was blueberry – and quite possibly the best blueberry pie I’d ever baked! The one on the right is sweet potato pie. With toasted marshmallows.
3D Printing Some Pi-shaped cookie cutters
I had a lot of extra pink filament…
But this year… Well, I’ve done nothing except only remember about the first 50 digits or so. I baked no pies (we’re watching our calories). And my 3D printer is offline (I really gotta fix that thing). So I’m going to do two things today. First, I’m gonna tell you why we care about Pi. Second, I’m going to dump my favorite Pi memes on you. And then for dinner, hubby has promised me some pizza pie…
(* here in the US. I know, not everyone thinks today is 3/14. There are some people who think it’s 14/3. But look – buy into our date nomenclature for just one day… there’s some yummy pie in it for you!)
Why is Pi important?
Simply put: It’s a fundamental principle or property of the circle. Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. If you know what diameter you have or need, you can calculate the circumference or vice versa.
And… we use Pi to build/construct/analyze anything with a circle (and even some non circle things). We use Pi to launch rockets and get to other planets. It’s useful to help describe pretty much anything that needs to be described mathematically. It is not simply a fake holiday created by math companies to sell more math…
Although, I do find that celebrating Pi Day is an important part of generating excitement for STEM. That “M” in STEM, of course, stands for ‘Math’, which is then used in the ‘STE’ parts of STEM. I don’t talk about math much, and have written about it even less. But that’s not because I don’t love math — I just haven’t had a lot to say about it! But math, particularly geometry, trigonometry, and basic algebra, is so fundamental to the engineering I’ve worked on in the last two plus decades…
So if you haven’t yet, come to the nerd side. We have Pi(e).
Ok – enough of that. Show me some memes!
If you’ve paid any attention to the internet on Pi Day of years past, you’ve probably seen a few of these already.
And of course… it’s also Albert Einstein’s birthday!!
