As engineering students, some of us find more joy and happiness doing math and science as opposed to eating, socializing, or even sleeping. So, in light of this, IET had organised a short event to celebrate Pi Day. Yes, you heard (read) that right, Pi, as in the numerical constant, and not pie, the food that most people crave and love.
For those of you who don’t know, the value of Pi is …
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862
08998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481
117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233
786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006
6(° ͜ʖ°)063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213
8414695194151160943305727036575959195309218……
(It never ends…… And I bet you just skipped to the end and didn’t see that face in there)
Since the most significant numbers of Pi are 3, 1, and 4, the celebration is held every year on the 14th of March. To be honest, I had attended the event hoping that I get to eat pie, as eating pies is one of the traditional ways people celebrate Pi Day. However, for this year, the only thing I consumed during the event was knowledge, which wasn’t bad at all.
To start the event off, we were given some icebreakers so that we get to loosen up and get to know each other first before the main activity.
Afterwards, we moved on to the main activity, which was the pi-related quiz. We were first divided into groups and each group had to choose eight consecutive numbers from the first few digits of pi (displayed on the board) as our group name. The purpose behind this was for us to knock out the other teams later on during the quiz.
During the quiz, we eliminate other teams by calling out their group names if they have at least three numbers in their group name coinciding with our own group name. But in order to get a clue to each group’s name, we must first answer the questions for the quiz correctly. Once a question is answered correctly, a random number from every groups’ name and the position of the number within the name would be revealed. Though answering the quiz correctly doesn’t benefit our individual team in any way, integrating the quiz with the game was a smart idea as it poses some friendly competition between each group and also helped keep things engaging and fun. Furthermore, we also got to learn interesting facts about the numerical constant Pi while battling each other to the death!
After completing the quiz, most of the groups were eliminated except for two groups (My group was one of them) as the groups’ names were unique (meaning that their group couldn’t get eliminated no matter how hard the other groups tried). From the quiz, I had found the following facts to be the most interesting:
- The world record for calculating the number of Pi is approximately 3 TRILLION digits, which was done by a super computer (calculating it yourself is not humanly possible)
- The celebration for Pi Day is also held on the same day as Einstein’s birthday. (Coincidence? I think not. △)
- People only started to use Pi around 300 years ago
Then, to end the event, we were showed how the value of Pi was derived. This was done by creating a human chain in the form of a circle and its diameter. By just counting the number of people comprising of the circumference and the number comprising the diameter, it was evident to that the number of people needed to fill up the circumference was approximately 3.14 times of the number people needed to fill up the diameter.
All in all, I found this event to be fun, engaging, and most of all, rewarding, as I had managed to bond with the other students and I also got to learn a lot in the span of only an hour.
Didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s Pi Day event? No worries, this event is celebrated annually, so there is always next year! See you there!
Photos courtesy of Sean Ng