In March 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed resolution HRES 224 recognizing March 14th as National Pi Day.

However, the day was created by a physicist named Larry Shaw in 1988, who celebrated at the San Francisco Exploratorium, with the eating of pie (every kind from pizza to banana cream).

Always celebrated on March 14, National Pi Day:

-recognizes Pi as the uniquely infinite irrational number,

-honors the Greek letter (Pi) as the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter,

-celebrates the birthday of physicist Albert Einstein, born on March 14, 1879

-and gives educators a fun holiday to incorporate even more STEM/STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) activities into their curriculums!

I’ll admit that I’m a nerd and I like pi! Pi, pie, pi I like pies! 🎶🤣

Let’s start making art that visualizes pi’s infinite and random digits!!!

Besides being beautiful and fun to look at, pi art is meant to awaken emotions about STEAM and start conversations about numbers and randomness.

FOR THIS SWAP:

• Create a cityscape or skyline by “graphing” the numbers in pi! Each building in the Pi cityscape will represent a number in pi.

• Create a sturdy postcard by filling in the number of squares on the paper that correspond to that digit of pi. You can glue strips or squares of paper to create a collaged cityscape, color with crayon, marker, colored pencils or paints! The media you use to create this piece of pi art is up to you! Personally, I think a rainbow of buildings would be awesome too! So, I’ve created a key assigning different colors to each digit in pi. Feel free to use or create your own color key with colors that you have available! 0 = carmine red 1 = viridian green 2 = chestnut maroon 3 = mango orange 4 = lemon yellow 5 = phthalo blue 6 = ash gray 7 = royal purple 8 = magenta rose 9 = platinum beige

• On the back of your pi postcard, write a pi-ku (haiku) poem or a reason why you like pi or pies! 😋 Or simply wish your partner a happy pi day! Then mail the postcard to share with your partner, either naked, in a clear protective sleeve, or in an envelope (sending artist’s choice)!

Have fun pi arting! 🥧🎨 P.S. The image used here is of a lovely evening silhouette and included coordinating stars she calls “pi in the sky!” Thought that was so clever! Anyway, have fun with pi y’all!

A Little Pi Day Trivia: On Pi Day in 2004, Autistic savant Daniel Tammet recited 22,514 digits in 5 hours and 9 minutes.

According to the Pi World Ranking list, Tammet's record was broken more than a decade later by Rick de Jong of the Netherlands, who recited 22,612 digits of pi in 5 hours, 34 minutes.

On 3/14/15 at 9:26:53 a.m., the calendar date and time matched up numerically with the first 10 digits of Pi: 3.141592653.

In 1897, the State of Indiana passed a law legislating the value of pi to be 3, which is very odd, since it is not true.

The “Indiana Pi Bill” No. 246 remains one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat.

Free Pi Printables

http://www.10minutemath.com/2011/05/free-pi-posters.html?m=1

WHY PI MATTERS? Pi is interesting because it describes a perfect circle, and is included in any formula describing a circle or some kind of repetition, from a heart beat to the Earth's orbit around the sun. Pi also has the appearance of being random (or, more accurately, "uniformly distributed") -- meaning that, as its digits continue, there is an equal chance of any digit between 0 and 9 appearing. But, IF pi were truly random, that would mean that the number sequence in pi would never repeat itself, and -- because pi is infinite -- it would contain all patterns in existence. Any word that you can think of, when encoded in numbers, would show up in pi. So would the entire works of Shakespeare, and all possible misprints! Pi looks random: Mathematicians have computed pi out to 10 trillion digits and seen no evident pattern. But what really vexes mathematicians is that no one can definitely say that pi is random -- no one has figured out the mathematical proof. And in another sense, pi is anything but random: After all, the number embodies the order of a perfect circle. "The tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi," writes Cornell mathematician, Steven Strogatz in The New Yorker.