by Andrew Wasik ’13

On the night of March 13, all across America, math teachers will fall asleep tucked into their beds after a long day of teaching and grading an endless stream of papers. But this night, unlike any other, they will have trouble falling asleep. March 14 is Pi day, 3.14. A day that math teachers, and only math teachers, treat like it’s freaking Christmas.

Only math teachers are capable of experiencing the sheer excitement coming from a day that happens to be the same number as pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. All across the world, these middle aged men and women put up the notes on their daily objective screens on the Promethean boards and projectors letting students know a fact about the day’s obviously significant and hilarious date that they will only remember for the following two hours and 23 minutes of their lives during which they will try and make their friends laugh with these obviously hilarious jokes exactly three times before eventually giving up and moving on.

But the teachers whose job it is to spread mathematical joy far and wide for all to experience are a different breed, and they can get excited over the fact that a date correlates to a famous number first used by the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes in 250 BC. They inform their students and then go home to inform their husbands, wives and children for the third time that day. Then, after anxiously killing time, they go to each other’s houses toting presents and  feasting with Isaac Newton pudding and Pythagoras cakes. Then, after everyone is full beyond belief, they all sit around the fire and share stories of a time before calculators and computers when people had to count on their fingers and toes like real mathematicians. After listing pi to 314 digits, they all share their goodbyes and go home, but already their thoughts are on next year’s celebration. The teachers kiss their sons and daughters good night after they are tucked into bed and share one last formula before clicking out the lights and shutting the door.

On this very same day, the average American teenager wakes up, goes to school, comes home, does homework, watches TV and eats dinner before going to sleep, blissful unaware that somewhere in their community, these teachers in charge of educating our youth are celebrating a made-up holiday with the same importance as Christmas or Thanksgiving. The real American holidays.