3.14 Ways To Celebrate Pi Day — Its Einstein’s Birthday Too!
Albert Einstein’s birthday is today! 3/14, which is also the first 3 digits of the mathematical constant pi: 3.14. Pi is to math,science and understanding the way things work is what Shakespeare is to understanding human experience: it encompasses all that we know and yet “its exact value is inherently unknowable,” according to Live Science. “Pi seems to crop up everywhere in the natural world, too. It appears everywhere there’s a circle, of course, such as the disk of the sun, the spiral of the DNA double helix, the pupil of the eye, the concentric rings that travel outward from splashes in ponds. Pi also appears in the physics that describes waves, such as ripples of light and sound. It even enters into the equation that defines how precisely we can know the state of the universe, known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”
It is another kind of magical synchronicity that the greatest scientific mind of the last century was born with those co-ordinates, and something to celebrate because we benefit in countless, continuous ways from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Information at the speed of light, lasers, everything we use to connect and also beat each other up, to extend our lives through modern medicine and also to blow each other up through modern weaponry. Lets invest a little hope in humanity by celebrating the mysteries math and science reveal and the problems they solve. Also there are desserts involved.
Here are some ways to celebrate:
1. Make a pi pie, like the one in the picture.
2. Eat 3.14 pieces of the pi pie.
3. Eat the pi pie with 3 friends and a person you like about .14 as much as the others.
4. Don’t tell the friends which of them you like .14 as much as the others.
5. Try to talk about math or science for 3 and .14 hours.
6. Make that 3.14 minutes.
7. Watch 314 episodes — or 3.14, whatever suits you — of The Big Bang Theory
8. Binge-watch 314 episodes of science shows, e.g. Cosmos, videos on physicist Brian Greene’s website or TED talks about science.
9. Read “The Night I Met Einstein” by Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Jerome Weidman, a beautiful account of music-loving Einstein giving an unexpected lesson in listening.
10. Do the Buffon’s Needle experiment: drop a needle on a lined sheet of paper. If you keep track of how many times the needle lands on a line, it turns out to be directly related to the value of Pi.
11. Take The Pi Day Challenge on Facebook. A team of logicians adapted or created these puzzles — some require research, some require mathematics, some require pure savvy.
12.. Check out all these Pi-and-Einstein-related events at Princeton University, where Einstein lived and worked and you can take a walking tour of his neighborhood.
13. Hug a scientist.
14. Stare at the stars for 3 1/4 minutes reflecting on the fact that some of them no longer exist. They burned out centuries ago in some galaxy far, far away but their light is only reaching us now.
Light goes on forever. Yours and mine and every star in the sky. Thank you Albert Einstein, for that knowledge and all that is yet to come.
Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, CGP, MT is a consultant/trainer and writer/performer. She is host/creator of (mostly) TRUE THINGS, a game wrapped in a storytelling show.
