Pi Day 2016

Yes I said pi not pie. Although Pi Day also winds up being a good excuse to eat some pie as many restaurants join in the fun and offer specials on pie for the day, so search out some good deals for your sweet tooth. Pi day has also given me a good excuse to create some fun photographic art for the occasion.

But I digress. If you are a math or science geek you probably already appreciate that Larry Shaw, a physicist working at the San Francisco Exploratorium, created Pi Day in 1989 to celebrate the all important mathematical constant pi. Last year was an extra special Pi Day as I mentioned in my previous blog post. This year is a fun Pi Day too, in addition to the fact that every Pi Day date (3/14) shares the first three digits of pi (3.14). Inspecting more of pi, we see 3.14159… . If we round to the ten-thousandths place we get 3.1416, the same as this year's Pi Day date (3/14/16). I had already created this year's Pi Day photographic art piece without thinking of this, so I thought it was a cool coincidence when my husband mentioned Rounded Pi Day to me this morning.

Here is a little background on how this year's art print came to be. I had a general idea that I wanted to do something using the "pie are round" theme. In addition my experimenting with the phrasing that I wrapped around the picture of a pie, my supportive hubby experimented with baking some pies. The first pie was a strawberry rhubarb pie with a wide lattice style homemade crust. It was delicious, but unfortunately it bubbled up a bit too much between the lattice and the πr², that I cut out of some extra dough and hubby dusted with sugar, did not have enough contrast with the lattice pie crust.

Pie experiment two was an apple pie. We took the short cut of using store bought pie crusts for this one. (The resulting crust was good but not as flaky or tasty as the homemade one.) This time I made the πr² twice as thick and brushed it with an egg wash that hubby made. This made for good color contrast once the pie was baked and I had a photo to use as input for this year's math geek home décor print. You can find last year's and this year's matted photographic art prints in my Eclectic Design Choices Artisans Cooperative shop or my EclecticSkeptic Etsy shop.

Update: My 2016 Pi Day matted print was purchased as a prop and can be seen on episode 8 of the Frasier reboot!