Let them eat Pi: Students celebrate mathematical novelty
03.11.10
You can have your math and eat it to at Tech Valley High School.
Students will celebrate Pi day on Monday with a series of activities to commemorate the mathematical novelty that is Pi.
The fun equation begins at 10:45 a.m. with a contest to see who can recite the most digits of Pi, which is an irrational number with an endless amount of digits that being with 3.14. Math teachers Jason Irwin and Michelle Sweeny said the Guinness record for the number of Pi digits recited from memory is 67,890.
Students will also conduct a pie tasting contest, bringing in their own creations for fellow students to sample.
Other activities will include a "Nerd-Out Costume Contest" - who can dress the most like a nerd - followed by a nerd parade, as well as Piku writing contest - who has the best original poem about Pi.
Pi is defined by Godling's Glossary as a number, represented by said Greek letter, that expresses the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of Pi has been calculated to many millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not smooth. Nature herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when they get sufficiently small. However, the continued extension of Pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.
