Wednesday Explorers Club ~ a great day for Pi!

 Have some Pi!

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230....

Oh, you probably wanted some of this kind of pi!

However you slice it, today is Pi Day. March 14th. 3.14. Kinda cool, right? So many ways to celebrate:

Bake a pie. It can be berry or apple or pizza.
Compose a tune using pi. Here's how one pi-anist did it.
Write some pi-ku. They are like haiku, but focus on things with circumferences and diameters. Like pizza.
Tackle a Pi-mile challenge. That's right, get up and go outside for a 3.14 mile run. Or walk.
Create a paper Pi chain. Use slips of different colored paper for each digit, and glue links together in the order of pi.
Calculate pi of hula hoops, then hula with your hoops.

Once in a Hundred Years Pi Day

Tomorrow - Saturday, March 14 - is a historic day. It's Albert Einstein's birthday for which, if he were still alive, he'd have 136 candles on his cake.

It's also Pi Day. March 14.
3.14. Get it?

But this year, Pi Day is extra special because it's 2015, which means tomorrow is 3.1415. And if you chow down on a slice of pizza at 9:26 and 53 seconds - either for breakfast or a bedtime snack - you get even more Pi: 3.141592653.

You won't see that again for another hundred years.

Celebrate Pi day! Here's How:

Have a Pi Picnic: Fill your picnic basket with Pi food. Pie, of course - apple, cherry, key lime - but there are other kinds of food that qualify. For example: pizza, pineapple, pickles, pita triangles with pinto bean dip and picante sauce, pistachios, or pierogis.

Play Pi games: like Pictionary, pitching horseshoes, pick-up sticks, or swinging at a pinata.

Run: a Pi marathon of 3.14 miles. Or 3.14 laps around the track. Unless you're still buried beneath eight feet of snow, in which case, pull out your snowshoes or skis ...

Go on a Pi hunt: Pi is tricky to find. It is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. In math language, Pi = c/d. To find Pi, you need a tape measure, a ruler, a pencil and paper, a calculator, and lots of round things: cans, cocoa mugs, pizza.... Measure the distance around an object (circumference) and divide that by the object's diameter (distance from one side to the other through the center). If you get anywhere close to 3.14 you're doing great.


Speak a Pi language: Pirate, pig latin, or pi-thon (you can find out how to speak like a snake here).

Write in Pi-ku or Pilish. Here's an example of pi-ku:

Preheat, roll the dough
Add sauce and cheese and garlic ~
Pie are round, not square!

To learn more about writing poetry in \Plish, go here.

Compose a piece of Pi for Fano or piccolo. Here's some inspiration.

For a real challenge, memorize Pi to the first million digits.  Or at least to the first 100 because, after all, this is a once in a hundred year event.

Today is STEM Friday. Head over to the STEM Friday blog to see what other bloggers are talking about.

Happy Pi Day    ~   3.1415

3.14 Ways to Celebrate Pi Day

Happy Pi Day!

Not only is March 14 Pi Day, but it's also Einstein's birthday - and that calls for a real celebration. So put on some music and let's get this party started.

1 -  Make a Pi Chain
You need 10 colors of construction paper, one color for each digit. For example: red = 1, blue = 2, green = 3.... Cut the paper into strips and glue the rings together in order of Pi.
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248

2 -  A Pi-mile challenge.
After all that sitting and cutting and gluing, you need to get out and stretch your legs. Nothing better than a 3.14 mile run to get your blood moving and make you ready for some...

3 - Birthday Pi or Cake

It doesn't matter which you make, as long as you have a measuring tape large enough to go around it. Measure how big the cake is around (circumference) and divide it by how far across (diameter) to get Pi - or at least a decent approximation of it.

3.14 - Decorate Pi plates: Glue a Pi symbol onto the middle of a paper plate and color it. Then write the digits of Pi around the outside border to as high as you want to go.

Pi-in-the-sky: Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879. Figure out how old he would be if he were still alive - and convert that into Pi years (a Pi year = 3.14 years). This is part of STEM Friday. Check out more science, technology, engineering and math resources here.



 

Celebrate Pi Day

Today is an excuse to play with math. After all, it’s Pi day – or at least as close as our calendar can approximate it: 3/14. 

That's because we don't have any dates that begin 3.14159265358979323846264 and just keep going and never end. That's what pi does. If you want to see the first million digits, go here.  

Pi is a perfect number to contemplate on this blog because back in 250 BC my hero, Archimedes worked out that the value of pi is greater than 223/71 but less than 22/7. He did this by approximating the area of a circle using the area of a regular polygon inscribed within the circle and the area of a polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. He started with a hexagon and worked his way up to a 96-sided polygon, getting really close to the approximation of pi.

So – what do people do on Pi day? They make pies - all kinds: apple, cherry, blueberry or pepperoni, sausage, extra cheese. Or all of them.

They calculate pi. You can do this too - just grab a pie and measure its circumference (around the edge) in centimeters. Then divide that number by the diameter and you've got pie pi.

They might make pi-dyed T-shirts, speak pi-thon or scribble poetic lines of pi-ku. Like like haiku, it's composed with three lines: 5 syllables/ 7 syllables/ 5 syllables.

            Preheat, roll the dough

            Add sauce and cheese and garlic

            Pi are round not square

Speaking of Pie and Poetry, here’s a new book to check out. The first poem, “Edgar Allan Poe’s Apple Pie” wants to know how many cuts give 10 pieces. And though there is no pi for Poe, you might want to bake an extra pie to test your answers. Regardless of what the answer key says, you can indeed use four cuts for 10 pieces – if you don’t care about divvying up your pie equally.

The poems make you think about math outside the the pie tin. I particularly like “Robert Frosts’s Boxer Shorts”, inspired by “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “William Carlos Williams’s Pizza” which – like certain plums – was just too inviting to resist.

Edgar Allan Poe's Pie is by children’s poet laureate and pie-eater, J. Patrick Lewis,and illustrated by Michael Slack. It's got 14 poems, each a reimagined classic poem spiced up with math, and should be on bookstore shelves by beginning of April. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (review copy from publisher).

If you’re still up for a slice of pi - and who isn't - drop by Vi Hart’s video on why “Pi is (still) wrong”

To find out what pi sounds like, check this out.