Every year, March 14th is recognized as one of the most famous days around the world by mathematicians, scientists, and math lovers alike: it’s Pi Day! Although we’re not celebrating actual pies on this day, there can most definitely be pies involved in your celebration.

What is Pi Day and Why Do We Celebrate It?

Pi Day recognizes the mathematical concept, Pi is equal to 3.1415, was explains why it’s celebrated on March 14th each year! For those who follow a month/date format, March is the third month of the year, and we celebrate on the 14th day! Pi is defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, with the diameter being equal to approximately 3.14. This unique holiday is one that’s celebrated by math teachers and their students all around the world, and by bakeries and grocery stores who will often sell their pies at a discounted price to join in on the fun! So what are you waiting for? Join in on the fun and celebrate Pi Day with your favourite type of pie!

Pi Day was first celebrated in 1988 at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a renowned museum of science and technology that encourages visitors to learn hands-on. A former employee and physicist of 15 years, Larry Shaw founded Pi Day. He believed that science and fun are not mutually exclusive and that everyone could come together to enjoy something based on science in an exciting new way. Since then, we have collectively continued to uphold our tradition of Pi Day across many countries.

The Best Activities to Celebrate Pi Day

Whether you’re looking to celebrate Pi Day at home, school, or at work, there are so many great ways to take advantage of this holiday! Here are some fun activities you can do to celebrate Pi Day in 2023!

Eat Pi Foods

A celebration isn’t the same without food! Why not celebrate this year’s Pi Day by baking some pie to share with your team at work? It’s a fun activity everyone can take part in - because who doesn’t enjoy pie?

Pi Day Run

A fun and unique way to celebrate Pi day can be to get outdoors! Whether you’re looking to get active close to home or to provide your students with an interactive way to celebrate the day, this is our favourite activity. Organize a run that’s 3.14 km in length to challenge yourself to see how long it takes to finish! You can use the Avenza Maps app draw and measure tool to draw your route and calculate the distance you’ll travel.

Memorize Pi

While this may sound like an easy activity, don’t be fooled! To memorize all the digits of Pi is way more difficult than it may seem. Challenge yourself, your coworkers at work, or friends in the community to see how many digits they can memorize without making any mistakes.

Create a Pi Map

This is by far one of our favourite activities to get in the spirit of Pi Day! This year, we decided to create a map for Pi Day called "A Geographical Slice of Pi". The map details the American ZIP code 31415 which is found in Savannah, Georgia! Get to know how Eric created the map below, using our desktop product MAPublisher.

A really important tool in creating this map was the MAP Theme Stylesheets that were used to create the cased lines that symbolize the roads. A graphic style was created to represent each road type, with double strokes utilized to create the cased style. These graphic styles were then applied to the entire layer using MAP Themes. MAP Themes also eased the creation of the legend. The roads were then grouped together by type to help smooth their transitions. 

Another tool used to create this map was the MAPublisher LabelPro add-on, which is responsible for the intuitively placed street and neighbourhood labels as well as the highway shields. All of the aforementioned tools worked seamlessly with the native Adobe Illustrator tools to create a high-quality map product.