Happy Pi Day!

Heathmont College celebrates Pi Day! 

Whilst in down under it may have been the 14/3, in the U.S. of A (and a handful of other countries) it was 3/14 which makes it international pi (3.14…) day! 

Pi is the ratio of the circumference (outside) of a circle to the diameter (width) and appears in all sorts of places in mathematics and physics. It is called ‘irrational’ and this means that when written as a decimal it never ends. 

Pi (or at least, an approximation of it) was first written by the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians almost 4,000 years ago. Since then, pi has been calculated to more and more decimal places, with recently pi being calculated using computers to 105 trillion digits! To get a sense of how big that is, if you were to type this in one line using this font, it would go from Earth to past Uranus! 

Students at Heathmont College didn’t quite calculate pi to 105 trillion digits, but they did manage to get three! By dropping toothpicks onto lined paper students were able to estimate pi with only 0.4% error, truly impressive! This technique is called Buffon’s needle, which students got to experiment with alongside playing pi-Scattegories, finding their birthday in pi, and estimating pi using a method developed by Archimedes, by using grids, and by throwing virtual darts. 

Merry mathing! 

Mr. Givens-Lamb and the mathematics faculty. 

Curriculum Area Leader