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Save Yourself A Piece of the Pi: Pi Day Comes to LBCC's Corvallis and Albany Campuses

Source: Maryilang at English Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Lovers of math and dessert rejoice!
 
Faculty at both the Albany and Corvallis campuses of LBCC are celebrating pi day with students with activities, games, prizes, and pie. 

In the 1980s in San Francisco a physicist at the San Francisco Exploratorium celebrated the first pi day, and the event has stuck. The trend has been to celebrate on March 14 at 1:59 p.m., representing the first six digits of pi: 3.14159. Now the tradition continues locally with the help of LBCC’s annual pi day. 

“It’s a day to be math-y and eat pie,” said Nicole Seaders, math faculty at LBCC who’s helping organize the event on the Albany campus. 

The celebration on both campuses will include a pi-ku contest. It’s similar to a haiku, with the 5-7-5 syllable pattern, except a pi-ku has a 3-1-4 syllable pattern. On both campuses there will be a vote on the best pi-ku with prizes. The Corvallis campus’ pi-ku prize is a pizza, while the Albany pi-ku prize is undetermined, but Seaders said it will be ”a homemade pie, or better.” 

If you want to participate in the contest but cannot attend during the designated time, you can turn in your pi-ku to the receptionist in the Learning Center on the Albany campus on the second floor of Willamette Hall, or in the second-floor lobby in Chinook Hall on the Corvallis Campus. 

The Albany campus will also have a best math joke contest, pie estimates, puzzles, and pi sudoku, which is like regular sudoku but instead uses the digits of pi. These smaller contests will also have smaller prizes, including small 3-D printed items such as cookie cutters.

Math faculty Claire Burke said the Corvallis campus’s activities will include a best math joke contest with a pizza prize for the winner, “a measuring pi activity, and a couple other puzzles, and pi-related word games for folks to try out.”

Both campuses will have a countdown to 1:59 p.m. 

The Albany campus event will be in the Learning Center from 1 p.m.-2:30 p.m. and the Corvallis campus event will be in the second-floor lobby of Chinook Hall from 1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m.

“Really, pi is really cool,” said Seaders. “We’ve sent digits of pi into space because we think if there are aliens they would know about it. It’s a fundamental feature of circles and surely, any being would think of a circle and then come up with this number.”

The pies will be both homemade by LBCC employees and store-bought and as a result the pies available are to-be-determined. 

In 2009, pi day became an unofficial holiday as ordained by Congress. Pi day also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday. 

According to an article by TIME magazine, “Today Is the 30th Anniversary of Pi Day. Here’s What You Should Know About the Irrational Number” by Eli Meixler, the annual celebration of the number has now gone on for several decades and has expanded. It lists the original exploratorium’s continued annual celebration, Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduate admissions, and NASA’s “Pie in the sky” math challenge. 

Join us in our celebration at LBCC to save yourself a piece of the pie.  

At a Glance: 
What: Pi day celebration 
When: Thursday, March 14
Where (Albany Campus):  on the second floor of Willamette Hall, in the learning center
Where (Corvallis Campus): on the second floor of Chinook Hall, in the lobby 
For More Information: Playlist of videos on the Youtube channel Numberphile, as recommended by Nicole Seaders

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