Celebrate Albert Einstein's Birthday and Pi Day

Do you love pi? No, not the baked good or the pizza slice, but the mathematical constant.

Wednesday, March 14 is Pi Day, the celebration pi, which equals 3.14. The Greek letter pi is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

Local Schools Get with the Pi

The math departments at Hazelwood East and high schools are marking Pi Day with activities, contests and fundraisers.

Hazelwood West will host a digits recital contest, and the math club will sell pie slices during lunch. Students are also designing and wearing pi T-shirts and bracelets. Money raised from the pie sales will help students attend Math and Science Day at Six Flags in May.

Hazelwood East is hosting “Hit a Teacher with a Pie.” During lunch, students can donate change to collection bins with the names of teachers and administrators they like the most. The top three with the most money will have cream pies tossed at them. The math department will sell pie slices. All money raised will be used to purchase graphing calculators for top seniors.

Companies Promote Math with Pi

As part of an initiative to get students more interested in mathematics, starting at 11 a.m., Ford Engineers will post a math problem on reddit, with new questions arriving every 3 minutes and 14 seconds. According to Forbes, the first person to correctly answer each question will win reddit gold.

Things Unknown About Pi

Here are a few facts about pi, according to Buzzle.com:

• In 1897, a legislature of Indiana tried to legally establish the most accurate value of pi. However, the bill was never passed.
• The value of pi with first 100 decimal places is: 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679
• Not a zero value (0) can be found in the first 31 digits of pi.
• Besides everyday geometry calculations, the value of pi is also used in numerous scientific equations including genetic engineering, measuring ripples, super strings, normal distribution and so on.
• Pi not only an irrational number but also a transcendental number.
• If you were to print a billion decimal values of pi in ordinary font it would stretch from New York City to Kansas.

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