Pi Day – It’s a Whole Lot Of Number

The science-inclined have a number of weird “days” to celebrate including mole day on Oct. 23rd celebrating Avogadro’s number, square root day on March 3rd, and today – pi day. π is intimately connected the circle, representing the relationship between it’s diameter and circumference.  We are most familiar with the short-hand, rounded version of pi as 3.14, but the number can be calculated out to trillions of digits after the decimal place.

So what to do on Pi day? Well, if you’re like most people you’ll go about your daily business without much of a stray thought regarding the science holiday, but if you’re MIT, you post your admissions online that day as a virtual tip of your hat. Some people indulge in writing pi-kus, the nerd’s equivalent to haikus. Check out Piday.org’s website and send an e-card, or read CNN’s interesting and rather lengthy article on the day. Perhaps the most trippy thing you can do today is to watch the film “Pi” online, a 1998 non-traditional thriller from director Darren Aronofsky about a man’s descent into a number-fueled paranoia.