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 πr
2, 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 πr
2 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!
Since 1989 math and science geeks have celebrated the all important mathematical constant pi and used the day, along with other folks, as a good excuse to indulge in their sweet tooth while eating some pie. The society of physics students has also turned Pi Day into a celebration of support for undergraduate involvement in the physical sciences. Pi appears in more than just mathematical equations, it is also found in many science formulas. You can help support STEM by helping undergraduate physics students get a piece of the pi(e) through your donation. (If you don't know, I have a Bachelor of Science in Physics so I think this is a great cause.)
sweet tooth. Pi day has also given me a good excuse to create some fun photographic art for the occasion.
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.
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.
