Pi Day Facts, Activities, and Puzzles

This week Washington politicians took a break from all the normal quibbling over who to rescue today, and named another National Day. National Pi Day, March 14 was approved in the House of Representatives and urges schools to take time to learn about PI and encourage the study of Mathematics. Pi Day is observed on March 14 (3/14) based on the numbers of the mathematical constant. Pi Approximation Day is observed on July 22 since PI is roughly equated to 22/7. If you want to take Pi Day one step further, some places celebrate the Minute as March 14 (3/14) and 1:59 pm (3.14159)

So what do you do on Pi Day? Math activities of course!. Brain Freeze puzzles offers a Pi Day 2009 puzzle for fans to do. It is a Sodoku puzzle which is printable here. If you solve the puzzle you can send your solution in for a chance to win a color sodoku book. You can also try your hand at the 2008 Pi Day puzzle here.

Pi Day puzzles are also available on the Do the Math tutoring website. Activities from two previous years are available for printing at the site may possibly offer a new one on Pi Day again in 2009. This site has a number of Pi Day match puzzles and also provides the solutions to the. Do the Math Tutoring is found here.

Looking for a written exercise instead of a math based one? How about vocabulary related to Pi Day and other math functions? Vocabulary.com has a variety of math vocabulary word worksheets and puzzles including word searches and root word puzzles. Vocabulary word worksheets for Pi Day lesson plans are found here.

How about sharing Pi Day with other math lovers? What are your favorite Pi Day equations? You can share them at piday.org at this blog.

And finally with Pi being a number with no set pattern, what is the likelihood that you can find your birthday in the random numbers of Pi? You can search for it here on the Pi Search page. Enter your birthday and see if you can find the numbers (March 14 2009 would be 03142009). This date shows at position 78,157,637. The PI search site currently checks 200 million digits. There is about an 83% chance you may find your birthday in these 200 million digits. This site also offers Pi Trivia information which may be fun to share with your Pi friends.

National Pi Day, enjoy the newly declared day with these Pi Day puzzles, and perhaps have some pie in celebration. Or is that Pi?

SOURCES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10194354-38.html