True or False: Pi is the most recognized mathematical constant in the world.
True! And this year, Pi Day (March 14) is being heralded as the Pi Day of the Century. 3.14.15 only comes around once and today happens to be that day. The DeltaMaker team was looking for a fun 3D print to help commemorate Pi Day and the Tower of Pi by Roman Hegglin certainly fit the bill.
There is something so subtly charming about wrapping 1200 digits of Pi into circles to form a cup. Based on the designer's recommendation, we opted to print the tower with the solid wall for our first run. Printed with grape PLA, the tower took the DeltaMaker 3D printer approximately 12 hours to finish and we were thrilled with the results.
There are lots of other activities you can do to acknowledge this little ratio that allows us to calculate so many things about circles. Both high and low tech, how are you commemorating the Ultimate Pi Day?
- Pi Digit Distribution: Look at the first 50 or 100 digits of pi and make a bar graph that shows the frequency of each digit. How many times does zero appear?
- Read Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi. Write short stories about Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi to read aloud
- Bake a Pi(e)
- Bake Pi Cookies (bonus points for a 3D printed cookie cutter)
- Make your own Pi shirt
- Use pi to tell the time. Convert naturally circular things into radians, like the hours on the clock. Instead of it being 3 o'clock, now it's 1/2 pi o'clock.
- Do a pi mile run (or walk). Run 3.14 miles (5.05 km), which is just a tiny bit longer than a 5K.