Best Pi Day of the century: A certain circular dessert is just one way to celebrate

No matter how you’ve celebrated March 14 in the past, this is the year to go all out — like 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862 etc.

If it has been a few years since you toiled in geometry or trig class, that number is pi, most famous in circle circles for finding the area and circumference of, you guessed it, a circle. Math teachers and fellow nerds have been celebrating the number each year on Pi Day, March 14. 3/14. Get it? The first three digits of pi.

But Saturday will be 3/14/15, which makes this edition the Pi Day of the century. Two more digits of pi! Heck, some of the geeks among us will be raising a glass all week. (And then measuring its circumference.)

They’ll be especially giddy on Saturday at 9:26, a.m. and p.m. Three more digits of pi!

Pi is represented by the Greek letter π. What’s its exact value? Unknown, because no matter how many digits you calculate it to, you’re not done. Like the Energizer Bunny, pi just keeps going and going, with no known pattern or duplication. (In math terms, it’s an irrational number.)

But we’re not here to make your head hurt. We’re here to tell you how others are commemorating Pi Day (said to have originated in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium) and how you can, too, by noshing (anything round), buying souvenirs or attending any of the celebrations around town Saturday.

Have some pie

There’s a National Pie Day, too (Jan. 23), but “it’s probably not quite as well-known as Pi Day,” says Jan Knobel, co-owner of Upper Crust Pie Bakery in Overland Park and Westport.

“To add Pi Day on top of a Saturday in March, which happens to coincide with spring breaks, I expect it’s gonna be a crazy day,” Knobel says. A slice of pie on Saturday will go for $3.14.

There’s no particular variety of pie associated with Pi Day, so just buy (or make) your favorite. Upper Crust will put the pi symbol on top of some open-faced pies such as bumbleberry, pecan and German chocolate. (They cost $23 or $24, plus tax. Pre-ordering is a good idea.)

Last year, Knobel says, a Shawnee Mission math teacher ordered enough pies to serve all his students. As she recalls, that was something like two dozen.

Throw a Frisbee

Math students at UMKC will celebrate Pi Day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday mostly on the quad, although there will also be an Ultimate Frisbee contest in Swinney Recreation Center. That starts at 9:26, of course.

“We were looking for some sport that’s a circle that’s easy to coordinate,” says Colin Barker, 25, president of the Mathematics and Statistics Graduate Student Organization. (Any ball other than a football will work for Pi Day, he adds.)

A 3/14/15 Pi Day “happens once every hundred years, so we’re just going crazy for it,” Barker says.

One professor and one graduate teaching assistant will also take whipped cream pies to the face (that’s a fundraiser). And for the more serious-minded, a pi lecture and a pi recitation contest.

“I’m not entering that,” Barker says. “My limit is 10 digits.”

The day’s eats: bagels, pizza and (of course) pie. The bagels will be from Einstein Bros., fitting because March 14 happens to be physicist Albert Einstein’s birthday.

Most of UMKC’s Pi Day activities are free and open to the public. Get more info at facebook.com/umkcmathclub.

Get married

Park Hill South High School math teacher Jennifer Engelhardt and her fiance, Chip Schoenfeldt, will tie the knot on Pi Day, but the date was a “total happy accident,” she says.

After they booked an Overland Park church for March 14, a math teacher friend of hers asked, “Isn’t Pi Day in there someplace?”

“We decided we had to go with it,” Engelhardt says.

So favors for wedding guests will include Pi Day pencils (printed with as many digits as will fit) and sticky-note pads with this sentiment at the bottom: “Love is like pi — irrational and never-ending.”

A cousin of the bride’s also designed a logo that incorporates the pi symbol into the couple’s initials.

There will , of course, be cake. But there will also be pie (apple and chocolate cream), served at 9:26 p.m.

Make some music

Science City at Union Station has an Epic Pi Day planned for Saturday (and remember that you can’t spell epic without pi). It all starts at 9:26:53 a.m.

Have you ever heard “The Sound of Pi”? A keyboard on the floor will have numbers assigned to keys; kids will turn pi into music by jumping around on pi’s digits in the right order.

Among other activities: estimating pi with Legos, demos of credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi computers and a pie-eating contest. Plus pie samples for all.

Kids will also build a paper chain representing the digits of pi. “I would love if it would go around the entire science center,” says Christy Nitsche, director of programming.

The Pi Day fun is free with regular Science City admission. More at unionstation.org.

Break out the hula hoops

Who geeks out the most over Pi Day: teachers or students?

“The teachers,” says Blue Valley Southwest math teacher Holly McCarty. “Plus our bright kiddos do, too. A lot of kids in advanced classes.”

At her school, Pi Day will be celebrated in math classes on Wednesday, the final day before spring break. Kids will bring in round treats of all kinds.

There’ll be no-hands-allowed pie-eating contests. Pop walks (think cakewalk) involving math formulas, with bottles of soda for prizes. And yes, hula hoop competitions.

Because students have already learned what pi is, Pi Day is “all about fun,” a celebration of math, McCarty says.

Over at Olathe Northwest, kids will be making pi bracelets on Friday. Teacher Lisa Burbridge says that each student chooses bead colors to represent 0 through 9 (like 0-red, 1-blue, 2-turquoise, etc.), thus every bracelet is unique. Black beads are used for the decimal point in 3.14 and for three dots at the end.

“Students can tell exactly where to start reading pi from, as (the 3) is between the black decimal point and the dot-dot-dot,” Burbridge says.

Memorize it

Go ahead, see how many digits you can store in your gray matter. But know you won’t be able to match Rajan Mahadevan, who in 1981 in India made the Guinness Book of World Records by memorizing and reciting 31,811 digits of pi (in English).

He was 23 at the time. His feat, broadcast on radio, took 3 hours 49 minutes, which included 26 minutes of breaks.

Mahadevan later earned a master’s degree from Kansas State University (in 1991). He is now a distinguished lecturer in psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

The current record-holder, according to the Pi World Ranking List, is from China, who recited 67,890 digits of pi. Mahadevan is No. 6 on that list.

More pi, please

Other ways to celebrate:

▪ Tell a pi joke. Math geeks love this one. (It helps to know that you say the formula for the area of a circle like you say Toys R Us: “pi R squared.”)

Pi are squared? No! Pi are round. Cornbread are square.

Ha.

▪ Run in circles. Choose from these Lawrence river trail runs on Saturday: the single-loop Pi Miler (3.14 miles, a tad longer than a 5K) and the River Rotation Half Marathon, a 13.14-mile, three-loop course. Homemade pie at the finish line! Details: www.lawrencetrailhawks.com; click All Races and Results.

▪ Get the T-shirt. There’s an almost infinite number of Pi Day T’s online. (Lots of “Ultimate Pi Day” and the digits. And “ePIc” is big; so is “party” with the pi symbol standing in for the T.) Not to mention coffee mugs and other merch. Cafe Press even has pi clocks that tell time in radians. But don’t ask us to explain radians.

▪ Try this. Write “314” on a piece of paper. (Make the kind of “4” that makes a little triangle.) Hold it up to a mirror and it spells — brace yourself — PIE.

So eat up.

This story was originally published March 9, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Best Pi Day of the century: A certain circular dessert is just one way to celebrate."