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Math Resources for Pi Day

Found In: Mathematics, Grades 6-8, 9-12

March 14th is the 24th annual Pi Day. Watch the Exploratorium’s Pi Day webcast (30 minutes) starting 1:00 PM PST and meet Pi Day founder Larry Shaw. Learn the history of Pi and how it is calculated and see a cool pi demo.

Pi day was founded at the Exploratorium. Explore the rest of the website’s Pi Exhibit.


Teachers can find more than 50 activities to make Pi Day entertaining, educational, tasty, and fun at links in other sites that let users explore Pi in other ways: search for number patterns in 200 million digits of Pi or approximate the value of Pi using Buffon’s Needle experiment.

Buffon's Needle involves dropping a needle on a lined sheet of paper and determining the probability of the needle crossing one of the lines on the page. To calculate pi from the needle drops, take the number of drops and multiply by two, then divide by the number of hits.

Wolfram MathWorld offers a library of 35 Pi resources. Topics range from Archimedes algorithm to Strassnitsky’s formula. Wolfram Demonstrations Project feature 31 Pi demonstrations beginning with Buffon’s Needle experiment. And don’t miss Wolfram’s discussion of Buffon’s Needle problem and Pi.

Finally, examine steps in the calculation of Pi and the creation of pie with the History of Pi(e) Timeline. Many entries include URLs to more detailed information. The timeline covers four thousand years and can be ordered oldest to most recent or the reverse.



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