Pi Day

Pi on TV: Mythbusters’ Grant Imahara’s Prisoner Number

Dan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:00:33 +0000

On Discovery Channel’s show “Mythbusters“, there’s an episode where Grant, Tori & Kari escape from jail using various kinds of ropes. Grant’s prisoner number is “3.14″:

Spell Google with Circles

Dan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:18:46 +0000

Google’s “Doodle” in many parts of the world is featuring Pi Day today:

Google on Twitter says they’re feeling geometric today. Happy Pi Day, Google!

Pi Links 2010

Dan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:30:20 +0000

In The News:

Also, follow the Pi Day buzz on Google Trends for Pi Day & Pi.

Finally, check out these Pi Earrings from ‘NerdGoddess’ on Etsy, as well as other the other handmade Pi crafts.

Pi on TV: Psych Season 4 Finale

Dan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:18:36 +0000

On the USA Network show “Psych“, private investigators Shawn & Gus find themselves in a room creepily trimmed with the digits of pi:

MIT loves Pi

Dan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:00:52 +0000

Each year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology releases its admission decisions at 1:59pm on Pi Day.

In 2009, the artwork on their homepage sported pi day greetings, and in 1994, as part of an elaborate prank, students put a campus police car number “Pi” on top of the “Great Dome”.

Poetry based on Pi

Dan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:43:46 +0000

A recently published book by software engineer & writer Michael Keith, “Not A Wake”, is a collection of poetry, short stories, and more based on Pi. Within the sentences, the first word will have 3 letters, the next word has 1, the next 4, 1, 5, 9, etc.

Even More Pi Music

Dan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:29:38 +0000

Check out EducationalRap.com’s Pi Day Rap page, including quite a few Pi rap songs you can listen to. My favorite line is “If I’m buyin’ rims for a car – circumference – hey, yo, 2 Pi r…”

Also, TeachPi.org has a nice Pi music page with downloadable lyrics to several songs.

A Pizza Place named “Pi”

Dan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:14:25 +0000

This Pizza shop was spotted by Eric, creator of the pisicle, in New Orleans:

Trader Joe’s Sells Pi(e)s

Dan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:00:45 +0000

This Pi Day promo sign was spotted outside Trader Joe’s in the Twin Cities:

How I learned to enjoy Pi

Kevin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:09:14 +0000

I first became aware of Pi in 2nd or 3rd grade, when there was a banner on our classroom wall showing the first 20 or 30 digits. It said something like “Pi ≈ 3.1415…”. I ask the teacher (though I don’t remember her name, now) what “Pi” was, and was told that it had to do with circles, and that we’d be learning about it later in the year.

When the “Circles Unit” came, we did most of the computation by hand (this was early elementary school) and approximated Pi as 3.14 (or 22/7, if we were “doing fractions”). We learned about the area formula: Pi*r^2 and the circumference formula: Pi*d. Somewhere along the line, I started memorizing the numbers off that banner. To this day, I’ve really never memorized any more than that, though I’ve tried on numerous occasions.

Later on, in Geometry (I think 7th or 8th grade), we started graphing Pi-related things on TI-92s, thus kindling my interest in TI Calculators. We learned formulas for the surface area (4pi*r^2) and volume (4/3*pi*r^3) of a sphere and probably some others. It was about this time that Dan and I started observing Pi Day and registered this domain name.

– Kevin