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Pi day... awesome!
(14 Mar 2005 at 12:09) |
Happy Pi Day (3/14), everyone!
Back in 1999, when I was an undergraduate, my math friend Dan Bruner and I decided that an appropriate Pi Day celebration would be to write as many digits of pi as we could on the sidewalk for everyone to see. We used really big digits and didn't have very much chalk, but we wrote about 888 (going from Wean Hall to the University Center) starting at 1:59AM, with our fingers freezing and our lungs wheezing at the end. In the following years we did the same, with more and more volunteers (once, our work was snowed on before daybreak!), each year doubling the amount of digits that we wrote, and also starting a bit earlier in the night and writing smaller. (Dan eventually graduated but I'm still here as a PhD student.) In 2003 we got 8192 digits with the help of about 20 people, which I thought of as the pinnacle of pi writing. When CMU moved its spring break to overlap Pi Day in 2004, and with most of my undergraduate friends graduated and most of my graduate friends working on their theses, I thought that would be the end of our chalking exploits.
Paragraph break for emphasis. I was wrong. Today I walked into campus to find that a group of CMU Pi Ninjas had picked up the disused torch, dusted it off, and carried on the tradition with aplomb; they had doubled our previous total to 16,384 digits!! I walked the entire route grinning. Fucking great job, guys. I am impressed, honored, and absolutely ready to have pi day chalking be an autonomous CMU tradition. Pi lives!! |
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Pi Day 2004
(14 Mar 2004 at 21:28) |
| Pi day is cancelled this year because it falls in the trailing weekend of our spring break. And I have a lot of fucken work. |
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NEW: Pi Day 2003
(17 Mar 2003 at 19:41) |
Well, 3 days ago on March 14, we celebrated Pi Day at CMU. (Get it? 3/14? ha!) I organized an event wherein we wrote thousands of digits of pi's decimal expansion across the campus sidewalks in chalk. More details and pictures are here.
8192 digits this year, doubling last year's total. But everyone knows exponential growth is not sustainable.... |
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Pi Day 2002
(14 Mar 2002 at 12:18) |
600×426 version For Pi Day (3/14) this year I rounded up about 20 people and wrote 4096 digits of the decimal expansion of pi across campus. We also painted the fence. There's some more info and a lot more pictures here! |
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Pi Day!
(14 Mar 2001 at 10:10) |
Happy Pi day! Though it was really rainy/snowy last night, we managed to get over 1600 digits of pi on the sidewalks of CMU.
Some Russian guy sent me this really weird Page about the Pi-Number. |
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