The Passing of Pi Day

At 1:59 p.m. on Wednesday, March 14--3/14 1:59--the world celebrated Pi Day. Yet the holiday, which remembers one of the oldest and most fundamental ratios in mathematics, was in fact celebrated only by a sad few. Across the city, lonely revelers--careful not to be seen together, lest their full nerddom be revealed--raised their tankards 3.14 times in silent commemoration. The Mathematics Department held a pie-eating contest, only perpetuating the trend that remembers our most famous ratio only through popular baked goods. I did not attend out of protest.

Some say the low turnout on Wednesday was due to similar political opposition. The date of Pi Day is based on an arbitrary choice of base 10; the holiday is thus biased against Mayans, Babylonians and binary computer systems, who all have refused to celebrate it.

Perhaps Pi Day was overshadowed by the Ides of March the next morning. The Ides are easily remembered; they have a great hero in Caesar and a great poet in William Shakespeare. Pi too has its heroes, Archimedes and Lindemann, and a poet in Dante, who in his Divine Commedy wrote eloquently about the geometer's inability to square the circle--"Qual e 'l geometra che tutto s'affige / per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, / pensando, quel principio ond' elli indige..." But I don't speak Italian, and it seems that for the moment the guy who writes in English has the upper hand.

The unfortunate truth is that there never will be a National Pi Day. What Congressmen would vote for such a measure? Pi has a troubled history with legislatures; in 1897, the Indiana House of Representatives declared pi to be exactly equal to 3.2.

Pi and politics simply do not mix. There could be no grandiose pronouncements, no claims that Pi Day is as American as mom, the flag and apple pi; the ratio, after all, belongs to the world. Legislators write home about how they were tough on crime, or saved the federal linoleum subsidy; any Congressman who told his constituency about his sponsorship of Pi Day would be laughed out of office. (Unless his constituency were entirely composed of mathematicians, in which case he would be anointed king.)

But if Pi Day falls by the wayside, what then? No other common mathematical constant has such holiday potential. Euler's constant e (2.71828...) would be blocked by the arbitrary constraints of the calendar; it could be neither Feb. 71 nor Feb. 7 at 1:82 p.m. The same goes for the Golden Ratio, 1.618... There will never be an i Day, and although we will have an Aleph-0 Day, it won't come for quite some time.

So those few of us who do recognize Pi Day--and celebrate it separately from Albert Einstein's birthday, which is also March 14--will continue on our own, taking in its honor 3.14 slow drinks from a perfectly cylindrical mug. And we will imagine better times, when the whole nation (nay, the world) can join in a truly universal holiday--when 3/14 will be a day of joy for all.