Pi Day at Science Central in Fort Wayne

Saturday/Sunday March 10-11, 2007.
(The actual Pi Day is 3-14.)

Science Central Volunteers and Professor Adam Coffman from IPFW set up the "Pi Day" activity table at Science Central.

The main project: build the "Pi Chain," color coded by digits of Pi!

Here's the color code

Pi Poster
(more precisely, a "transcendental" number is not a root of any non-zero polynomial with integer coefficients)

Kids having fun

"5" golden rings

A topological error?

The length of the chain by Saturday afternoon
(starting with pink = 3 on the far right)

Gets longer by Sunday

There's Pie in the break room

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286
208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481
117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233
...

Some links on the internet about pi:

At the Math Forum: http://mathforum.org/library/topics/pi/

David H. Bailey's page: http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/pi/

David Blatner's page: http://www.joyofpi.com/

St. Andrew's History of Mathematics Archive: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/
(try a search for pi)

Did the Indiana state legislature really pass a law in 1897 declaring pi to be equal to 3.2?
No, it almost did, but a Purdue math professor happened to be in the capitol at the time and stopped it:

http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/Localgov/topics.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Some links on the internet about Pi Day (March 14):

At the Math Forum: http://mathforum.org/t2t/faq/faq.pi.html

http://www.teachpi.org/

A PDF file of Adam Coffman's handout for Pi Day:

includes Niven's one-page single-variable calculus proof that pi is irrational
and comments on repeating and non-repeating decimals.

To the Department of Mathematical Sciences