Will you remember where you were on March 14, 2015?
The day might not measure up to man’s first steps on the moon or the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a historic moment in time, but for math geeks in Maine and beyond, it will be a date to remember. And many of them – including a craft beer brewer in Limerick, a musical math teacher in Biddeford and pie-eating students in Limestone – are commemorating the special occasion.
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Jon Jacques' ‘Pi-Rational Rhapsody’
PI FACTS
• Pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around its perimeter) to its diameter (the distance from edge to edge measured through the circle’s center).
• It is approximately 3.14159.
• It is a constant number, meaning the ratio is the same no matter the size of the circle.
• It is an irrational number, meaning it can’t be represented as a fraction, and it continues infinitely without repetition or pattern.
• Greek mathematician Archimedes, who was born in Sicily in 287 B.C., used many-sided polygons to approximate circles and determined that pi was approximately 22/7. The symbol for pi, the Greek letter π, was first used by William Jones in 1706.
Source: piday.org
Saturday is Pi Day, which nerds and numbers buffs celebrate each year on March 14, or 3.14 – the first three digits of the mathematical constant for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. And this year represents a once-in-a-century occurrence, when the numerical sequence of the month, day and year matches the first five digits – 3.1415 – of the never-ending number represented by the Greek symbol pi.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” said Tim Bissell, marketing director for Gneiss Brewing Co. in Limerick.
The craft beer maker has been preparing for the rare occasion for years. Geologist-turned-brewery-owner Dustin Johnson began thinking about how to “take advantage of the best Pi Day ever” even before the company opened in 2013, Bissell said.
Last Pi Day, the company brewed a beer on fermented sour cherries plucked from a neighbor’s tree. The brew sat in red wine barrels for the next eight months and has been bottle-conditioning since. The 500 bottles will go on sale Saturday when the brewery opens at 9:26 a.m. – the hour and minutes representing the next three digits of pi.
Six Maine bars, including Nosh Kitchen Bar and Little Tap House in Portland, also will have the beer on tap.
Biddeford High School math teacher Jon Jacques plans to drop into Elements, a bar, cafe and bookstore in Biddeford, for a pint of Pi.
“Why not? A beer named after my favorite number,” he said.
He might also stop by Portland Pie Co.’s newest location, on Main Street in Biddeford, for one of its Pi Day specials – $3.14 for pints, 10-inch specialty pies, slices and kids’ meals. The Scarborough-based pizza chain has made March 14 its annual customer appreciation day.
But most of Jacques’ celebrating happened in class Friday, when he premiered his latest pi-themed musical parody to the tune of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
“I’m just a math guy/Nobody gets me/I’m just a math guy/Teaching trigonometry,” he sings on an animated YouTube video to go along with the tune.
It’s the seventh song he’s written for Pi Day, which he first learned about in 2007 from a student at Sanford High, where he taught for 15 years.
In celebration of the day, his class that year wrote pi-related lyrics to the tune of “Stand By Me.” Since then, Jacques has parodied “Sweet Caroline,” “Time after Time,” and “Eye of the Tiger” for Pi Day.
He started making recordings of the songs in 2012, and last year he made his first video. This year he had planned to perform a concert of the songs in Sanford on March 14, but that changed after he took the job in Biddeford. Even though he’s new at the school and Pi Day fell on the weekend, Jacques wasn’t going to let it pass by without a song or some pies from Reilly’s Bakery in Biddeford, which his uncle owns.
“This year being such an important Pi Day, I just couldn’t not do anything,” he said.
He even had a student meet his challenge of coming up with a pi parody. She based hers on Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”
Perhaps nowhere else in Maine is Pi Day such a universal big deal as it is at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone.
The school, which draws gifted math students from around the state, always makes an event out of Pi Day. There’s a pie-eating contest and a competition for who can recite the most digits. Last year, the winner recited more than 100, said senior Andy Whitman, who organized this year’s activities.
Although the celebration this year is similar to previous years, he said, there’s one new feature for this mathematically special Pi Day. School administrators have offered up an added prize for contest winners – taking a pie to the face.
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