As easy as pi

SCIL teams celebrate Pi Day’s 300th anniversary with a panoply of challenges related to the world’s most famous number

By RICHARD A. ROSS

GRAHAMSVILLE, NY — In a world marked by inconstancy and instability, it’s nice to have pi. On March 14 (3.14), the students from the Sullivan County Interacademic League (SCIL) gathered at Tri-Valley High School for the fifth of this year’s competitions to concentrate their energies on tasks related to that greatest of mathematical anomalies, pi.

Pi, an irrational number with an infinite number of decimal places that never repeat, is best known for its use in formulas to determine the circumference of a circle. Pi is a real number denoted by the symbol , which is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference C, to its diameter D=2R.

The use of pi dates back to the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, but our modern-day understanding of pi, as a more exact figure, as well as the use of the symbol, which is the letter ‘P’ in the Greek alphabet, is attributed to William Jones, who described it anew in 1706.

March 14 is often celebrated as Pi Day and is also the birthday of Albert Einstein. Students at Tri-Valley High School, under the auspices of math teacher Mary Zanetti, wore colorful Pi Day t-shirts during the school day and gathered in the school corridor for a Pi Day photo taken by high school principal Ken Sherman.

Each of the SCIL teams divided into sub-groups to address the day’s list of challenges, which included the following:

· A pie-baking contest (apple pie)

· Pi trivia involving answering multiple choice and fill-in questions. Students had 60 minutes to answer as many questions as possible correctly. Students were allowed to use calculators and as many members of the team as they desired.

· Memorization of as many places of pi as possible after the decimal. Dave Lundgren of Sullivan West reeled off 121 digits to take first place in this task.

· Poster t-shirt contest involving the design and drawing of a t-shirt on poster board that included some pi facts, formulas, digits, references to the 300th anniversary and/or Einstein’s birthday.

· An Ode to Pi

· A musical performance of pi by taking the first 50 places after the decimal and assigning a sound to the digits 0-9. Students used given musical instruments, clapping, stomping, whistling and singing to perform their pi masterpiece.

The results of this SCIL competition were as follows: Sullivan West 200 points, Fallsburg 177 points, Monticello 166 points, Eldred 152 points, and Tri-Valley 147 points.

The current standings after five competitions are: 1) Monticello 953, 2) Sullivan West 898, 3) Liberty 885, 4) Tri-Valley 839 and 5) Fallsburg 826.