Pi Day

π Day (Pi Day) is upon us soon (on 3/14 or March 14). If you'd like to prepare for it and have some activities for your children/students, check these resources.

If your students don't yet know what Pi is, start with the basics: it is very fitting to explain and discover pi on Pi Day.

Here's a Pi webquest for older students who can search the Internet and encyclopedias on their own. The "Historian" in the webquest has to find answers to some questions, while the "Pi Maker" needs to make an edible model that shows the parts of a circle necessary in finding the value of pi.

BrainPop has a movie about Pi.

Remember also that 22/7 is a great fractional approximation to Pi. This means that if 7 pepperonis nicely fit in the diameter of a pizza, then 22 nicely fit to go around.


(From Exploratorium.edu Pi posters)


Find where your birthday is in Pi - e.g. if your birthday is March 14, 1971, find where in Pi's digits is the sequence 31471. (Mine wasn't anywhere in the digits it searched.)

You can read how other teachers have celebrated Pi day. Lots of them use pies - mmmm!

2009 21st Annual Pi Day Celebration page is a good place to spend some time on Pi day or otherwise. You can see read history of Pi, see previous Pi Day images, read Pi limericks, download Pi posters and so on.

Then once you are done with that and STILL have appetite for more, go explore tons more Pi stuff at the links found here.

Pi Day

π Day (Pi Day) is upon us soon (on 3/14 or March 14). If you'd like to prepare for it and have some activities for your children/students, check these resources.

If your students don't yet know what Pi is, start with the basics: it is very fitting to explain and discover pi on Pi Day.

Here's a Pi webquest for older students who can search the Internet and encyclopedias on their own. The "Historian" in the webquest has to find answers to some questions, while the "Pi Maker" needs to make an edible model that shows the parts of a circle necessary in finding the value of pi.

BrainPop has a movie about Pi.

Remember also that 22/7 is a great fractional approximation to Pi. This means that if 7 pepperonis nicely fit in the diameter of a pizza, then 22 nicely fit to go around.


(From Exploratorium.edu Pi posters)


Find where your birthday is in Pi - e.g. if your birthday is March 14, 1971, find where in Pi's digits is the sequence 31471. (Mine wasn't anywhere in the digits it searched.)

You can read how other teachers have celebrated Pi day. Lots of them use pies - mmmm!

2009 21st Annual Pi Day Celebration page is a good place to spend some time on Pi day or otherwise. You can see read history of Pi, see previous Pi Day images, read Pi limericks, download Pi posters and so on.

Then once you are done with that and STILL have appetite for more, go explore tons more Pi stuff at the links found here.

Listen to your Pi!

Today is Pi day (3/14 or March 14) and to celebrate it, you can LISTEN to your Pi!

My hubby said the music is pretty good but needs a chorus...

And here are a bunch more links for celebrating Pi day... from Let's Play Math.

Listen to your Pi!

Today is Pi day (3/14 or March 14) and to celebrate it, you can LISTEN to your Pi!

My hubby said the music is pretty good but needs a chorus...

And here are a bunch more links for celebrating Pi day... from Let's Play Math.

Cute circle terminology song

This was sent to me... I thought it was a very cute, melodic song about learning circle-related terminology such as radius, diameter, and circumference, and the two formulas with Pi (area formula and circumference formula):




Here's a direct link in case you want to spread it around:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4SUypJZxo

This is done by Dave Mitchell who also has a website Arithmecode.com.

Cute circle terminology song

This was sent to me... I thought it was a very cute, melodic song about learning circle-related terminology such as radius, diameter, and circumference, and the two formulas with Pi (area formula and circumference formula):




Here's a direct link in case you want to spread it around:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4SUypJZxo

This is done by Dave Mitchell who also has a website Arithmecode.com.

Pi Day

I almost forgot...! Today is Pi Day! See, it's 3-14 (March 14) and pi ≈ 3.14.

To celebrate, check some pi day activities.

Pi Day

I almost forgot...! Today is Pi Day! See, it's 3-14 (March 14) and pi ≈ 3.14.

To celebrate, check some pi day activities.

Pi's digits

Here's the answer as to how many decimal places Pi's decimal expansion has been calculated:

1,241,100,000,000 decimal digits

It's more than 1 trillion digits!

This was done in 2002 by Yasumasa Kanada and 9 other individuals in Tokyo.

See www.super-computing.org/pi_current.html for more details on this project.

Okay, and if you'd like to start memorizing it, here's a link to Pi trainer :)

Pi's digits

Here's the answer as to how many decimal places Pi's decimal expansion has been calculated:

1,241,100,000,000 decimal digits

It's more than 1 trillion digits!

This was done in 2002 by Yasumasa Kanada and 9 other individuals in Tokyo.

See www.super-computing.org/pi_current.html for more details on this project.

Okay, and if you'd like to start memorizing it, here's a link to Pi trainer :)

Hands-on with pi

Pi seems to be such a simple thing - it's just two letters, and after all, you just peek into any math book to find out its value. Everybody knows about it, "Pi? Ah, yes, they taught us that in school, so it's something pretty simple."

BUT have you ever given pi some more thought? And, if you let your students give pi some more thought, it might just make math a little more interesting and 'lively' for them, too.

Think thought about it - how come the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter can be an irrational number? After all, this is not something that would naturally come to mind if you've never heard of irrationals before... If you start measuring lots of circles and calculating ratios, yes, you would soon notice that in every circle the ratio is the same. You would notice it's a little over 3. But would you just GUESS on your own that this ratio isn't a rational number?

If you have the time (and homeschoolers might), give your student a project to find what is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter by measuring. Tell them they can play an ancient mathematician now and let them work at it - don't even tell them it's called pi and hide all math books for a while...

Some kids might just love such a hands-on activity.

See if they get so far as to realize it's the same constant in all circles. And congrats if they get 3.14 or even get it between 3.1 and 3.2.

During all the measuring your student is not likely to think that this number would be irrational - he probably hasn't even heard the word before!

And mathematicians didn't find that out real soon either. Ancient cultures were aware of the fact that the ratio of circumference to diameter was a constant. The formulas they used for the area of circle indicate the equivalent value for pi as 377/120 or 3 1/8 or 256/81.

Archimedes found out that this ratio was between 223/71 and 22/7. Or, to be exact, he was finding an approximation for the area of the circle via this simple method: he drew a regular polygon inside the circle and outside the circle, and calculated the areas of the polygons-- obviously the area of the circle would have to be between those two numbers.

Archimedes wasn't afraid of calculations and used a polygon with 96 sides...! You might try giving 8th graders this as a project using just hexagons or octagons.

It makes for a nice exercise in geometry, plus it should be interesting since it ties in with history. Here's a nice slideshow about Archimedes' method.

Over time, mathematicians were able to calculate Pi more accurately - find better rational approximations to it. I'm sure they started to guess that maybe Pi is irrational - in fact, my guess is they suspected it to be so for a long time.

Proof of pi's irrationality came in 1768 by Johann Lambert. After that, mathematicians have been sure of that - but the quest for finding pi's decimals still continues.

Guess how many decimals they have found thus far?

Answer will be posted here in a coming blogpost. I'll leave you hanging - you can do the same in school. Why hand them all the answers on a plate?

P.S. Here's a link about history of pi if you want to learn more.

Hands-on with pi

Pi seems to be such a simple thing - it's just two letters, and after all, you just peek into any math book to find out its value. Everybody knows about it, "Pi? Ah, yes, they taught us that in school, so it's something pretty simple."

BUT have you ever given pi some more thought? And, if you let your students give pi some more thought, it might just make math a little more interesting and 'lively' for them, too.

Think thought about it - how come the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter can be an irrational number? After all, this is not something that would naturally come to mind if you've never heard of irrationals before... If you start measuring lots of circles and calculating ratios, yes, you would soon notice that in every circle the ratio is the same. You would notice it's a little over 3. But would you just GUESS on your own that this ratio isn't a rational number?

If you have the time (and homeschoolers might), give your student a project to find what is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter by measuring. Tell them they can play an ancient mathematician now and let them work at it - don't even tell them it's called pi and hide all math books for a while...

Some kids might just love such a hands-on activity.

See if they get so far as to realize it's the same constant in all circles. And congrats if they get 3.14 or even get it between 3.1 and 3.2.

During all the measuring your student is not likely to think that this number would be irrational - he probably hasn't even heard the word before!

And mathematicians didn't find that out real soon either. Ancient cultures were aware of the fact that the ratio of circumference to diameter was a constant. The formulas they used for the area of circle indicate the equivalent value for pi as 377/120 or 3 1/8 or 256/81.

Archimedes found out that this ratio was between 223/71 and 22/7. Or, to be exact, he was finding an approximation for the area of the circle via this simple method: he drew a regular polygon inside the circle and outside the circle, and calculated the areas of the polygons-- obviously the area of the circle would have to be between those two numbers.

Archimedes wasn't afraid of calculations and used a polygon with 96 sides...! You might try giving 8th graders this as a project using just hexagons or octagons.

It makes for a nice exercise in geometry, plus it should be interesting since it ties in with history. Here's a nice slideshow about Archimedes' method.

Over time, mathematicians were able to calculate Pi more accurately - find better rational approximations to it. I'm sure they started to guess that maybe Pi is irrational - in fact, my guess is they suspected it to be so for a long time.

Proof of pi's irrationality came in 1768 by Johann Lambert. After that, mathematicians have been sure of that - but the quest for finding pi's decimals still continues.

Guess how many decimals they have found thus far?

Answer will be posted here in a coming blogpost. I'll leave you hanging - you can do the same in school. Why hand them all the answers on a plate?

P.S. Here's a link about history of pi if you want to learn more.