A Physicist, Some Fruit Pie, and a Big Idea
The whole thing started with a staff retreat. In 1988, physicist Larry Shaw was working as a curator at San Francisco’s Exploratorium when he proposed something unusual: a holiday honoring the number pi. The date was obvious — March 14, or 3/14, matching the first three digits of 3.14159. The time for festivities? Exactly 1:59 p.m., because of course it was.
Shaw, who earned the nickname the Prince of Pi, organized the museum’s first celebration around fruit pies and tea. Later years brought what he called pi-rades — conga lines of staff and visitors snaking around the building, each person representing a subsequent decimal digit. Shaw led every march until his death in 2017. The Exploratorium still holds annual events: lectures, concerts, pi processions, dessert.
The Schools That Made It a Competitive Sport
St. Bonaventure University doesn’t just celebrate Pi Day. They schedule it down to the minute. Festivities begin at exactly 1:59 p.m. on March 14 and run for precisely 2 hours and 65 minutes — a runtime designed to spell out 3.14159265. Try explaining that at a normal party.
MIT took a different approach: using Pi Day to release undergraduate admissions decisions, then embedding pi digits into the timestamps. In 2015, decisions dropped at 9:26 a.m. on 3/14/15 — giving the sequence 3.1415926. Two years earlier they’d used 6:28 p.m. to nod to tau, the rival constant. In 2020, back to 1:59. These are admissions officers who had fun in college.
