It’s March 14, or 3/14, which means it’s Pi Day, and Toronto is celebrating with a pie throwing party and pizza deals.
Though it has become tradition to mark the day with a slice, you don’t have to love π to eat pie.
The day was initially established to encourage people to pursue math and STEM-related subjects, but celebrations have broadened since.
In Toronto, people are invited to hurl cream pies in each other’s faces, with consent, of course.
The pie throwing festivities will take place between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. at Bellevue Square Park, people are advised to bring their own pies, goggles, and clean-up supplies.
Pizza restaurants city-wide are also offering Pi Day deals, including Blaze Pizza and Pi Co. where in- store customers can get a pie for $3.14, and Maker Pizza where all slices are $3.14.
Pizza Nova has a delivery offer, where customers who order a large two topping pizza can get a small cheese pizza for $3.14.
Pi Day was first coined by Larry Shaw, an American physicist, curator, and artist at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988 and was officially recognised as by the U.S. government in 2009.
Pi is an ancient formula devised by Greek mathematician Archimedes and is applied across many fields of study from engineering and to astro-physics, and represents a constant—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
Every year since 1988 the San Francisco Exploratorium has hosted events and activities in celebration of the world’s most useful digits and the rest of the number loving community has followed suit.
Even Toronto’s very own Kensington Market is hosting a Pi Day celebration, but it has nothing to do with math.
Fun Facts about Pi
- According to piday.org, since the exact value of Pi can never be calculated, we can never find the accurate area or circumference of a circle.
- The record for reciting the most number of decimal places of Pi was achieved by Rajveer Meena at VIT University, Vellore, India on 21 March 2015. He was able to recite 70,000 decimal places.
- In the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, a circular parade happens every year on Pi Day. Each person participating holds one digit in the number Pi. But the day wasn’t celebrated in the United States until Congress passed Resolution 224, which officially marked March 14th as Pi Day. Congress hoped that celebrating Pi Day would cultivate a higher level of enthusiasm for math and science.
- Pi is an irrational number and we will never be able to calculate all its digits. The current record from the most digits computed is 22 trillion. The calculation took over a hundred days.
