Happy Pi Day

3.14 aka March 14th is pi day. What kind of math teacher would I be without a full day of pi celebration today?

Most of my classes began with students asking, "Who's birthday is it?" Or "What's pee day?"

We had a lot to learn! We started off watching this catchy little jingle.

Then, we talked about the history of pi, which was originally called Ludolphin after the guy who was able to theoretically calculate pi to 35 decimal places using a method called "squaring the circle." In 1949, a computer calculated pi to 2037 decimal places. It took that computer 70 hours to do that. 70 hours...that's crazy. Then, just six short years later, in 1955, a computer calculated pi to 3089 decimal places in 13 minutes. In six years, the computer was able to calculate an irrational number to over 3000 decimal places in a fraction of the time it took it to do 2000 places. Even more impressive than that is that in 1997 two people calculated pi to 51,539,600,000 decimal places! That's over 51 billion. Just in case you're not completely bored out of your mind, you can look at the first 100,000 decimal places here.

After we talked about the history of pi, we got to eat some pie. But, not until we tried to calculate pi first. We measured the circumference and diameter of oatmeal cream pies and then divided the two: C/D. Some students got very close to pi and some not so much. No one could get exactly pi because you have to have a perfect circle and perfect measurements to get the exact ratio, which is not possible with oatmeal cream pies and human measurement. But, the snack was yummy!

Then, we read Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi, a cute story about a boy who discovers pi as he tries to solve a riddle to save his father who drank a potion that turned him into a dragon.

We ended the class by writing poems about pi. My students could choose between a pi-ku (haiku all about pi) or a pi-em (poem using the numbers of pi). With the pi-ku, students had to have 5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second line, and finally, 5 syllables in the last line. If they chose to do the pi-em, their first line had to have three words, second line had to have one word, third line had to have four words, etc. I was really impressed with what some of them came up with. Some wrote more about pie than pi, but I let it count. I'll post some of their poems later this week so stay tuned!

HAPPY PI DAY, EVERYONE!