Belated Pi Day party celebrates famed 3.14

Peter Speh '07 began the festivities by accomplishing the impossible: he finished an entire apple pie — without utensils — with 20 seconds of "Another One Bites the Dust" to spare.

The event was only the beginning of the belated Pi Day festivities sponsored jointly by the Princeton Society of Physics Students and the Princeton Undergraduate Math Club. It was held on Friday at 3:14 p.m. in room 317 of Fine Hall. Room 314 was occupied by a class at the time.

"I've been celebrating [Pi Day] ever since high school," said Maylen Rafuls '07, vice president of the math club, who later gave a talk on Niven's proof that pi is irrational.

For the members of the math club, Pi Day provided an important way to promote their passion.

"It's like having a Math Day. It's a way to celebrate math in a day," Tamara Broderick '07 said.

The math club decided to hold the event Friday because the actual Pi Day, March 14, fell during spring break, math club president Jian Shen '07 said.

A committee was set up to plan the event, which, despite a brief emergency involving a lack of utensils, went off mostly without a hitch.

"We didn't have the resources to do it last year," Shen said. "We had been thinking about it for a couple of years, and Tami and Maylen brought it together."

There were 45 pies for the celebrants, ranging from traditional pies like apple and blueberry to more elaborate ones like coconut custard and pumpkin.

Recitation excitation

After the pie-eating contest was held, with teams from the math, comparative literature, physics and biology departments competing, everyone gathered for what many considered to be the main event: the pi recitation contest.

One by one, brave contestants mounted a table and recited as many digits of pi as they could.

Elizabeth Landau '06, the first participant, set the tone of the competition, easily rattling off 158 digits.

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"I started memorizing pi in sixth grade," Landau said. "For me it's been a culmination of eight years of having been in love with the number pi."

Landau, who also runs a website devoted to pi called "The Digit Connection," described pi as a math novelty that could not be emulated.

"The square root of two just doesn't have the same caché in the math world as pi," she said.

Another contestant, Carl Boettiger '07, who stopped abruptly at the 51st digit, declaring, "That was all I got to this morning."

A dramatic rendition of pi, interspersed with French and Turkish, was also offered.

As each recitation ended, math professor John Conway was seen to whisper the correct digit. When called on by the onlookers to recite pi himself, Conway noted that the recitations had all been too slow, following with a short rendition of pi at a very rapid pace.

The ultimate winner of the contest, however, was Jordan Amadio '05, who recited exactly 200 digits. He described his victory as a culmination of thesis procrastination.

"The key [to reciting pi] is the rhythm. I just broke down the information into groups of five and memorized them. Next came putting them all in sequence, so I came up with pneumonic devices," he said. "It's just a fun party trick, for the right kind of parties, of course."