Preceded by National Open an Umbrella Indoors Day and followed by Brutus Day, today, March 14, is Fill Your Staplers Day, Potato Chip Day, and – most widely celebrated – Pi Day. Both Pi and pie lovers across Hillsdale’s campus are celebrating the holiday with mathematical principles and delicious dessert.
Pie Makers
Senior Megan Moss is a math major celebrating Pi Day with the math honorary, Kappa Mu Epsilon, in an induction ceremony for new members. As president of the honorary, Moss said she is looking forward to making pumpkin pies and celebrating with the new members.
“We get to initiate new honorary members and eat pie with them,” said Moss. “That’s why we’re having the ceremony on March 14. Celebrating Pi Day on your own would be mildly tragic, but celebrating with the math department will be wildly entertaining!”
Abigail Loxton, senior and vice-president of the honorary, will also be making pies for the induction of 19 new members.
As a Math and Economics double major, Loxton said Pi day “definitely has the best refreshments of any math-related holiday.”
Junior Lauren Holt loves baking pies. Though not a mathematician herself, she teams up with her friend, junior Mary Coran, to add some additional sweetness into their Pi Day festivities.
“I’m making her an apple pie because she likes the way I bake them and it’s apt,” said Holt. “I prefer sweet potato pie myself, but apple is simpler.”
Holt’s passion for pie making teamed with Coran’s mathematical enthusiasm combine to make Pi Day the idealistic pie day.
π Users
“[Holt] and I are celebrating Pi Day with mathematical crafting, which includes, but is not limited to, paper dodecahedrons, mobius strip chains, and turning the digits of pi into a song,” said Coran. “We’re also going to have a contest over who can memorize the most digits of Pi. The highest I ever got was 77 digits.”
Coran said Pi Day is her second favorite mathematical holiday; her first is Tau Day “which is kind of like the Pi Day for hipsters. It’s mathematical value is 2, so it falls on June 28.”
Faculty of the Hillsdale Math and Science Departments, prolific users of Pi, enjoy this math-related holiday as a chance to bolster appreciation for mathematics and the sciences, sometimes even by enjoying a slice of pie, if not with thematically-appropriate crafting.
Professor of Chemistry Christopher Hamilton said he celebrates Pi Day with his students.
“I usually do something fun with my bio-chem students along the lines of bringing in pies for bonus points,” said Hamilton. “We all have a piece in class and then share with the math faculty and anyone else who is hungry.”
David Murphy, professor of mathematics and faculty sponsor of Kappa Mu Epsilon, said Pi Day is an important way to foster love and appreciation for math and an opportunity for outreach.
“Math can be fun and enjoyable,” Murphy said. “It should be.”
Murphy says he learned 15 digits (3.14159295358979) of the number that he knows from a banner listing the digits of pi in his high school geometry class; he would try to memorize the numbers of Pi during boring or repetitive lectures.
Murphy did not know about Pi Day before coming to Hillsdale six years ago. Although he plans to celebrate with the math honorary, he said no bells or whistles will be going off at 1:59 in the morning (the next three digits of the number pi).
Instead, the celebration will include homemade pies, courtesy of the honorary officers who bake far better than he does, including Moss.
Murphy stated that cherry pie is his favorite.
It is important to remind people of mathematics as fundamental to a liberal arts education and of “the important place that Plato recognized it to have,” Murphy said. Math is the “achievement of centuries, of millennia of men.”
As he explained the counter-intuitiveness of the moebius strip – the geometric surface with one side and one boundary created by twisting a strip of paper and joining the ends to create a band – Murphy said that the challenge of math is part of the fun.
“Every solution provides new problems, creating a never ending quest,” Murphy said.
Contrary to the popular belief that “all roads lead to calculus,” math, rather, has connections to all of the humanities: art, architecture, history, and even English. The Greeks considered astrology and music as branches of math as well.
Because Pi Day is immediately followed by the Ides of March, Murphy thought it might be fun to have a competition between the math and classics departments, an idea that is still in development.
The upcoming month of April is also Math Awareness Month. Other math-related holidays include World Math Day (March 1) and Math Storytelling Day (September 25) .
Murphy hopes that through holidays such as these, especially through Pi Day, the “honest, meaningful connection” to the liberal arts education can be conveyed to the campus and the community while sharing the power and beauty possessed by math.
π / Pie Lovers
So, whether you prefer to fill your staplers or enjoy a bag of potato chips, make sure you also try some Saga cherry cobbler and attempt the challenge of a good math problem in celebration of the advancements of math in Pi Day.
Or, do both. Remember, area = r 2, so you can calculate before you enjoy, thanking Saga for the scrumptious pie and ancient mathematical antiquity for the gift of π.
