Tuesday, March 18, 2003
The following is an excerpt from an email that my friend Patty, a math teacher in New Jersey, sent me last week:
Happy Pi Day to you! I am celebrating this day (3/14 is the reason) with my geometry and college math classes. They are doing a group activity where they measure the circumference and diameter of round objects, calculate C/d, and discover Pi. Yay. I'm sitting in my classroom after school right now, looking for some other cool stuff, like songs and poems about Pi (so I can sing or recite one tomorrow and make a fool of myself), and I found the following. I remembered how fond you are of Kurt Vonnegut, so here is a Pi quote from his novel, Breakfast of Champions:
“‘And now I drew a symbol whose meaning Dwayne had known for a few years in school, a meaning which had since eluded him. The symbol would have looked like the end of a table in a prison dining hall to Wayne. It represented the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. This ratio could also be expressed as a number, and even as Dwayne and Wayne and Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and all the rest of us went about our business, Earthling scientists were monotonously radioing that number into outer space. The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this symbol of their secret lives:”
And, as he had been inserting stupid little drawings throughout the entire novel, he drew a representation of the capital letter Pi.’”
Incidentally, that last line was from the author of the site that had the quote, so it's not me that called Vonnegut's little drawings throughout the novel "stupid." I haven't seen the novel, but if I did, I'm sure I wouldn't call the drawings "stupid."
So, sadly, you didn't get the card on Pi Day. Wah. It turns out that the principal came to observe my 9th period class yesterday as I did this lesson, and he loved it. He had lots of nice things to say to me after class was over. At 1:59 PM, we were a few minutes into class, and I told the kids that they were the lucky class that would truly experience Pi Day, as Pi = 3.14159..., with the date being 3/14 and the time approaching 1:59. They loved it, and we had a countdown to the exact time: "5...4...3...2...1...PI DAY!!!!!" It was so funny. They needed to let off steam the last period of the week. I told the kids that it was also Einstein's birthday, and the birthday of Sierpinski, a pioneer in fractal and chaos theory (i.e., the Sierpinski Triangle). I said, "Yes, Pi Day is also Einstein's birthday, AND it is Sierpinski's birthday! Coincidence? I think not!"
Happy Pi Day to you! I am celebrating this day (3/14 is the reason) with my geometry and college math classes. They are doing a group activity where they measure the circumference and diameter of round objects, calculate C/d, and discover Pi. Yay. I'm sitting in my classroom after school right now, looking for some other cool stuff, like songs and poems about Pi (so I can sing or recite one tomorrow and make a fool of myself), and I found the following. I remembered how fond you are of Kurt Vonnegut, so here is a Pi quote from his novel, Breakfast of Champions:
“‘And now I drew a symbol whose meaning Dwayne had known for a few years in school, a meaning which had since eluded him. The symbol would have looked like the end of a table in a prison dining hall to Wayne. It represented the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. This ratio could also be expressed as a number, and even as Dwayne and Wayne and Karabekian and Beatrice Keedsler and all the rest of us went about our business, Earthling scientists were monotonously radioing that number into outer space. The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this symbol of their secret lives:”
And, as he had been inserting stupid little drawings throughout the entire novel, he drew a representation of the capital letter Pi.’”
Incidentally, that last line was from the author of the site that had the quote, so it's not me that called Vonnegut's little drawings throughout the novel "stupid." I haven't seen the novel, but if I did, I'm sure I wouldn't call the drawings "stupid."
So, sadly, you didn't get the card on Pi Day. Wah. It turns out that the principal came to observe my 9th period class yesterday as I did this lesson, and he loved it. He had lots of nice things to say to me after class was over. At 1:59 PM, we were a few minutes into class, and I told the kids that they were the lucky class that would truly experience Pi Day, as Pi = 3.14159..., with the date being 3/14 and the time approaching 1:59. They loved it, and we had a countdown to the exact time: "5...4...3...2...1...PI DAY!!!!!" It was so funny. They needed to let off steam the last period of the week. I told the kids that it was also Einstein's birthday, and the birthday of Sierpinski, a pioneer in fractal and chaos theory (i.e., the Sierpinski Triangle). I said, "Yes, Pi Day is also Einstein's birthday, AND it is Sierpinski's birthday! Coincidence? I think not!"
