March 14 is Pi(π) Day, the yearly celebration of a never-ending number—π(3.14159…). The tradition began on March 14, 1988, when a scientist, called Larry Shaw, connected March 14 (3.14) with the number of (3.14159…) and asked his teammates to mark the day by eating pies. Later, more and more people began to celebrate Pi Day each year, and in 2009 the US lawmakers announced Pi Day an official holiday. Pi Day has been noticed in different ways by different groups of people in America.
Restaurants celebrate Pi Day with special selling of pies. Blaze Pizza has continued its tradition by offering a kind of pizza for just $3.14. Blaze Pizza's boss Jim Mizes said. "We guessed that we would serve as many as a quarter-million pizzas at $3.14 and even more on Pi Day of this year. We think Blaze fans across the US and Canada would come in to celebrate with us."
Some women scientists also celebrate Pi Day. Since 2015, to encourage more girls to work on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, some women scientists have been wearing purple on Pi Day. They also ask women of all ages and backgrounds to join them by wearing the same color on March 13-14.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will join in the fun with their yearly "Pi in the Sky" challenge. The fun activities are designed to encourage students from 5th to 12th grade to help NASA scientists solve real-world problems using π. Each year, many students take the "Pi in the Sky" challenge to help NASA scientists with their scientific research, which greatly benefits students in their future study.
Though Pi Day celebrations are rather new, π has been around for thousands of years. 4,000 years ago, Babylonians calculated (计算) the area of a circle, giving n a value of 3. The ancient Egyptians came closer to the real number with 3.165 in 1650 BC. Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BC) was the first to calculate it mathematically. The Greek scientist gave his number between 3+(1/7) and 3+(10/70), which is much closer to "3.14159…".
