LaSalle educator celebrates math on Pi Day

The vice president of the Ontario Association for Mathematics Education says pi is one of the most beautiful numbers in mathematics because of the many places it turns up in life that are not connected to circles.

David Petro made the comments on CBC's Windsor Morning in honour of Pi Day, which falls on March 14, and which celebrates the number obtained by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. 

The date, the fourteenth day of the third month of the year, corresponds approximately to the value of pi: approximately 3.14159.

"It's an important number in mathematics," said Petro, the vice principal at Villanova High School in La Salle, Ont.

"Your cell phone does not work the way it does without pi being known to a certain number of decimal places."

Math has a public relations problem, Petro said, so math teachers like him welcome opportunities like Pi Day to celebrate the field of study, even if it's just by eating a piece of pie.

Petro celebrated by wearing a shirt that read, "My PIN is the last four digits of pi."

"That would be an interesting joke, a funny joke, in math circles, because pi is a decimal that goes on forever," he said.

"And it never repeats. … Of course my PIN is in there somewhere. It's just maybe not the end."

Pi Day is a relatively recent phenomenon as days of observance go, and Petro credited the internet with giving birth to it.

"There's a great math community online that talks about these things all the time," he said.

He used the occasion to encourage people to embrace math, even if they don't think they're good at it.

"If you're one of those people that says, you know, 'I could never do math' … I think you're wrong there," he said.

"You might have not  …  had the experience of doing well in, quote, school math. But we do math every day. And give yourself some credit about the math and the mental, you know, calisthenics you have to do to do that math on the fly."