Happy Pi Day: March 14, 2010

It's Pi Day, Albert Einstein's Birthday, and the day we spring ahead with daylight savings time. Numbers and formulas are significant today. Google has even made a special logo to mark the occasion. Here's the scoop about Pi Day from Erictric:

Since pi approximately equals 3.14, March 14 [3-14] was chosen as the date to celebrate pi in countries that use the month/date format. Pi Day was founded by now-retired physicist Larry Shaw 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Nowadays, the holiday is celebrated by eating different kinds of pie, and by discussing the relevance of pi.

I'm wondering what those discussions sound like. We haven't gotten that far at my kitchen table, I'm afraid. But I have always had a mad fondness for pi, as the refuge of both the "irrational" and the circumference of a circle. And I wish I'd had some math teachers who talked more about the ideas in math – my kids have been lucky that way. (Thank you, Mr. Berzins!)

Here is what Google, the King/Queen of algorithms, has to say about pi – strangely enough, that logo is missing on that page, though it appears on the search page. (Here's a link to a couple of other Google logos. My nieces are onto it: they've made pie!